Reflections

I knew quite a bit about computers before taking the digital art class since I have a web design certificate, but there is always something more that I can learn. I had written a blog for another class last semester and posted photos on flickr.  I did not experience cell phone photography with the rest of the class since the cell phone I had at the time did not take pictures. Since then I got a new phone which does take pictures. I took my first pictures with it a couple days ago at Tribute park. I wanted to photograph the sculpture there for my blog. I went to the park after work and when I got there I realized that I didn’t have the camera that I usually keep in my purse. I forgot to put it back in after taking some other photos, so I thought back to earlier in the semester – the best camera is the one you have on you. I took a few photos with my new cell phone.  After getting home, I realized that I had no way to get the photos out of the phone so I could use them in time to post before the end of class. I ordered a cable so I will be able to take the photos off the phone to use once it arrives. I went back to the park the next day and took more pictures with the camera that I didn’t have before. So I am still looking forward to seeing my pictures on a larger screen and experimenting with cell phone photography.

I had also worked with both raster and vector based programs before. What I didn’t know is that there are programs for free on the web. I’d ripped CDs before, but was not aware of the different formats that songs could be ripped to. I had never made a slide show with music or a mashup before.  Generative art and typographic art was new to me, other than old style Ascii art. I found the programs on line for making these to be fun and made more than required. I may actually want to go back and play around with those some more. While I made things with Illustrator, I never got to be an expert with the pen tool. Seeing some of the Vector art out there like the Vector portraits makes me want to learn to be better at this. I’d like to be able to create such awesome art using computer methods.

I’ve written websites before. I first learned when the web was new and you could learn just being viewing the source. Now so much is generated by programs that you need a much better understanding to be able to tell what the source code even does. Also, some things you can’t even view by looking at the source anymore. I have since learned to make websites using Dreamweaver, Microsoft Expression web and can now add Google sites as another way that I can put up a website. I still think I can improve on making my sites look more visually appealing. View my website that I started for this class.

What I’d like to learn now is how to make better vector art. I’d also like to learn about some other types of art like printmaking, painting, ceramics, etc. Although my current interest is in photography and digital art, I want to explore as many types of art as I can. I’d also like to improve my communication and people skills. Since this is an online course I probably seem better at communication than what I feel I am. As an online course it relies on written communication without all of the additional facial expressions, gestures, tone of voice and other aspects of communication in person. I am not as good at picking up on a lot of those nuances as most other people. I know many people find it harder to understand when the communication is only written. For me, I feel it puts me on a more level field as everyone else without all the aspects of communication that can confuse me.

Workers' Memorial Day and the Veterans' Glass City Skyway

Workers' Memorial Day is April 28. It was started by the Canadian Union of Public Employees in 1984. It was recognized by the United States in 1989. It recognizes workers who have died or sustained serious injuries or illness related to their work. Five people died here in Toledo during the construction of the Veterans' Glass City Skyway. Four workers from Ironworkers' Union Local 55 died on Feb 16, 2004 when a two million pound launching truss collapsed . Their names are Arden Clark II, Robert Lipinski Jr, Michael Moreau and Michael Phillips. The fifth worker, Andrew Burris died on April 19, 2007. He was a member of the Carpenters' Union Local 1138. The platform on which he was working detached from the bridge and he fell to his death.

Veterans' Glass City Skyway

This sculpture was built as a memorial to these men. It is called Tribute Memorial. It was designed by a Chicago Artist named Evan Lewis. It is 40 feet high and has kinetic elements at it's top. Centered underneath the sculpture is a plaque with the name of the sculpture and artist and the names of all of the workers who died creating the nearby bridge. According to the artist, the kinetic elements represent the constant effort of the workers who built the bridge. 

I had never visited this sculpture before and although it was a couple days later than Workers' Memorial day, it was an  appropriate time to reflect on the loss of life creating the bridge just a few years ago. I didn't know exactly where the park was just that it was somewhere on the east side near the bridge. I drove by it a couple of times without realizing it because I was looking on the river side of Front street. Then I saw it on the opposite side of the street from where I had been looking. Tributes to the dead have always been a use for art. It helps us to remember their lives and sometimes what they gave their lives to acheive.
For more information about this sculpture visit the Veterans' Glass City Skyway Tribute Memorial page on the Arts Commission of Greater Toledo website.

Art at Kleis Park

Besides having art in Downtown, at the Toledo Zoo and at the University of Toledo campus, there is also art scattered around town. The area of town I live in is known as Shoreland, which is near Point Place. Most people even from Toledo don't know where Shoreland is, but if I say Point Place they know where that is. Near the Point Place Branch of the Toledo Lucas County Public Library is a park called Kleis Park. This is where some of the closest public art to me is.
This piece is called Mud Life and is made of brass and concrete. It is the work of Mags Harries and Lajos Heder and depicts creatures of the water. There are five life forms in the sidewalks - the Mayfly, Polychaete, Sludge Worm, Larva and Clams.

Also, along the Summit Street side of the park is one of the frogs that was part of a 2001 public art project in Toledo. This frog is called Handsome Prints. (or Hansom Prints according to the current sign) I photographed all of the frogs on display that year and put them on a website, where they have been ever since. To see all of the frogs go to my Toledo's Frogs page. The pictures there seem small now because screen resolutions have changed from what they were in 2001.

If you live in Toledo, look at the Arts Commision of Greater Toledo website to find the closest public art to you.

Art in Ottawa Hills-just off campus

I had talked in a previous post about the art on the campus of The University of Toledo and how we are lucky to have some pieces that change from year to year, which is pretty unique among college campuses. Well we are also lucky to have a changing sculpture exhibit just off campus. If you go to the corner of Bancroft and Secor, which is walking distance if you live on campus or in the student apartments in the areas around campus, you can see even more art in the park area in Ottawa Hills that is bordered by Bancroft St, Indian Rd and Orchard Rd.  There are 10 more sculptures over there, so take a walk and look around. It doesn't even need to be a 5 or 10K walk. There is lots of art both on campus and nearby. Here's my photos of selected works.

Mimic by DW Martin

Homage to Matisse Detail by Mike Sohikian

Trinity by Douglas Gruizenga

Ruffian by Amy Havens

To see more photos of art in Ottawa Hills visit the Midwest Sculpture Initiative. To see real art and not just a picture of it visit the park.

The Toledo Zoo is full of Animals ... and Art

On Monday April 16, I took a day off of work and I went to the zoo. I had not been there for quite a long time and lots things have changed. There are exhibits I had never seen before. Some areas were closed because of renovation or making a new exhibit. One thing had not changed--there is still lots of art at the zoo. There are still the older stone statues like the triceratops, and many metal sculptures of animals.

Triceratops

Panda

Lion

There are murals on the walls of the Carnivore Cafe, where people eat in the cages.

Tiger from the mural in the Carnivore Cafe

A large dragonfly is on the outside of the Zoo Museum.

Dragonfly on the wall

A metal sculpture is near the area where new construction is being done.

Elephant sculpture

A new sculture of a kite with string is in Nature's Neighborhood, the children's area.

I enjoyed looking at the art and animals at the Toledo Zoo.

Waterville, OH art

I went out to Waterville for a walk. I did the 5K since it was raining when I started and it was my first walk of the season.  The walk started at a place called Peddlers' Alley. I never knew about this place since I'd driven by Waterville many times, but never stopped before. Inside were a number of shops. There also were murals on the walls. Here's a couple of my photos of Peddlers' Alley.

Inside Peddlers' Alley

Mural which includes an actual bird nest

Another mural inside Peddlers' Alley

The actual walk was along the river from Farnsworth metropark heading west. I walked along past a couple shelter houses and picnic spots and enjoyed the views of the river and redbud trees. 

Nature=Art

After completing my walk, I decided to stop in the Garden Smiles gallery. I enjoyed looking at not only George Carruth's art, but art by several other artists including pottery, glass and cards.

George Carruth's Garden Smiles gallery



Student Curators Present: African Art

One of my current projects is helping with an exhibition curated by the students in the African Art class I am taking this term.  The Exhibition is being held April 27 - July 24, 2012 in the Hitchcock Gallery on the lower level of the Toledo Museum of Art.  The topic chosen for our exhibition is Leadership and Spirituality in African Art.  Please come out to see it.

Each student in the class researched a work of art and wrote a paper about it. The sculpture above is the work that I wrote about.  It is a woman devotee of the cult of Shango. Shango was an early king of the town of Oyo in Yoruba (which is in the same area as modern day Nigeria). Shango was an impulsive man who was interested in magic. He is said to have created a storm with lightening which killed many of his subjects including some of his wives and children. After that he committed suicide. When another storm came to the area, his supporters claimed that it was Shango. He had not died, but became a god. Shango is the god of thunder. His worshippers hold a festival in his honor and figures such as this one are in the Shango shrine along with items of Shango worship.

Art on Campus

At the University of Toledo we are very lucky to have works of art around campus. One day last month I was visiting on the main campus and photographed a few of these works. Some of the sculpture on campus is on permanent display there and others are up for sale.  Every year works not owned by the University are moved and new sculpture is displayed. This is not something that I have seen at other college campuses I have visited. I hope the students and staff enjoy seeing the changing variety of sculpture on campus.

Peace Portal by Shawn Morin

Harp by Mike Sohikian

Sentinel by Brian Ferriby

To see other sculpture on campus stop by and look around. Also you can see more on the web at the Midwest Sculpture Initiative.

Making Logos with Raven

This week I learned to work with Raven, part of the Aviary tools that are free online.  Although I have worked with Illustrator before, I never spent enough time at it to become good at using the pen tool. Mostly in the past I used basic shapes or the pencil tool.

Logo 1.egg by vmeyer7 on Aviary

The first logo I made features a camera and the word art. I didn't use a font my work,  but drew it out instead, so the word represents actual art. Since my blog is about photos I take of art, I thought this would represent what the blog is all about. It seems to me to be a pictorial explanation of what my blog is about. (If only I could find time to write more actual posts on this, at least before the end of the term!) I really think I should have made the background white instead of transparent because that could look quite bad if anything was behind it that wasn't plain. Since I used the pen tool to make the camera, anyone else who is relatively new to this tool can understand the difficulty of drawing even something simple with it. For the letters I used the pencil tool and had to play around with the settings on that because I was getting either too many handles on them or not enough. I used the tools that let you add or remove handles and moved them around to fine tune my letters.



TMA Sculpture.egg on Aviary.

Above is the second logo I created. It doesn't say exactly what my blog is about, but it was interesting and fun to make. Anyone from Toledo could probably recognize the Stegosaurus Calder sculpture that is in front of the Toledo Museum of Art. I also drew this using the pen tool and did some rearranging to move some pieces of it behind other pieces. I wanted to use a gradient for the background. That was somewhat of a challenge to figure out how to use. Every time I clicked on the tool, nothing seemed to be happening. I finally figured out that I had to choose the fill first and select my options in the property boxes on the right before drawing the line that creates the gradient.

Making Art with Text-Part 3 Textorizer

With Textorizer, I decided to play around with some famous art. First I switched to the Google Chrome browser since this program only works on Firefox or Chrome.
I experimented with one of Claude Monet's water lily paintings. Here is a picture made with the original Textorizer:

Then I tried the same painting with Textorizer 2:

Then I did the same thing with an Edward Hopper painting of a sailboat. Below is the Textorizer version:

Here is the Textorizer 2 version:

Again, I prefer the versions where the subject is recognizable, the Textorizer 2 version.

The last painting I played around with was Edvard Munch's The Scream. I used Excoffizer on this painting with several different settings. Here is the first result I got using Excoffizer:

Here is the last version I generated:

For this last one I used opacity of 100, angle 180, wiggle 22.8, space between lines 5, stretch x 1.15, and stretch y 0.85. With all the settings available in this program there are many possible results. Excoffizer was my favorite program to play around with from this assignment.

Making Art with Text Part 2-using Tagxedo

Tagxedo is a program for making tag clouds. These can be made with basic shapes or using a picture.
I decided to use the Toledo Zoo logo and some text from their website. I did a lot of respins-which is what they call it when you regenerate with a different text orientation or color or font. Here are a couple of the ones I liked best:

One thing that I didn't like about this program is that before I hit save it had a colored background, so what I saw on the screen didn't match what it saved and it's hard to tell what the logo really looks like. So I saved a version as a screen shot. This is that result:



Last, I decided to try putting the words inside the logo instead of outside of it.

Overall, I liked this better than the generated ascii art.

Making art with text

My latest experiments have been with online tools for creating art from text. This picture was made using an ascii art generator at http://www.glassgiant.com/ascii/

It was made with a photograph of a cat. I was not really happy with this. Next I tried some different options at http://www.text-image.com/convert/. I decided to see what it would do with the same image.
Here is the ascii version:



This website also has a version that looks like the text from the movie "Matrix". Here's a picture of the same cat using that version:



And finally an html version:

I like the html version the best, because it looks like most a cat. I don't think I'd really want to make many pictures out of these programs. The ascii pictures generated with this don't look like ascii art to me. Maybe these programs are capable of something else that I just didn't think to try, but my idea of ascii art is more like that on the website Chris.com. 

Experiments with Generative Art

I never knew how many programs were out on the internet that people could create with before taking the Digital Art class that I am in now. One of these programs is scribbler.  For my first attempt at using this program, I drew some basic shapes--triangle, circle and square. I found it a little difficult to draw exactly since I had never used this before. I chose settings for the color, line transparency, line thickness and scribbliness. Here is my result:

My next experiment was to draw a star and see what happened with that.

After that I decided to draw a line that curved back and forth and see what was generated by that. I set the transparency at 50, thickness at 5 and scribbliness at 65, which I wrote on the bottom after generating this result.

Then next program that I tried was Scribbler Too.  This is an improvement on the original scribbler which has many more options to set. Here is a screen shot of the options that can be set in Scribbler Too. It also allows uploading an image that you can trace and then save the results that will not include the original image that was used for tracing. So I found a picture of a cat on a kid's coloring page on the web and used that. My first picture using that is below the screen shot of the settings.



I decided to try it again with different settings. I also changed colors for the nose and eyes. There are many possible ways to work on the same subject.

Next I attempted to make something that would appear to have volume. I didn't think this first attempt quite got it.

This one seems more successful to me. It also has a transparent background, although you can't tell it here.

The next program that I experimented with was Flame. The first picture here I think represents love because of the colors with the pink, red and white. Also with the yellow which seems to me to be a happy color.

Next I made one that looked something like a bird to me, so I added a foot to it.

Then I drew a bird on the canvas, but I don't think it looks nearly as interesting as the one above.

I also attempted making some flowers:

The last picture here using flame represents excitement to me, because of the bursts of lighter color on the black background.

I made another picture in Scribbler Too, using a famous work of art to draw on. I call this one Persistent Scribbler.

I enjoyed playing with these programs. If you haven't used them already, check them out.