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.

Toledo's public art

Toledo is fortunate to have public art around town. I took pictures of some of it while I was working on the urban landscape assignment for my digital art class. Here are samples of them:

There are several works of art around the downtown area that were created by UT printmaking students.

There are also a number of artistic benches around town. They are part of the Young Artists at Work program sponsored by the Arts Commission of Greater Toledo

I don't know the story behind this work on the side of a building, but I think it's cool.

Then there are the more well know works like "Who's up" at Fifth Third Field.

Making a Video Mashup

This is the first video mashup I have ever made.
It's called Jazz Penguin Mashup.
 
I made this mashup using clips I found on YouTube. I downloaded trailers from Mr. Popper's Penguins and Happy Feet 2 and a number of different files for the sound. Most of the music is various types of jazz. I used part of the music I made in Aviary from the last project for the intro music. This video contains entirely instrumental music. I choose not to use any songs with words.
This video was made using FileLab on the web. I found the most difficult parts to be splitting the music at the right spot since I had no visual cues to know where to make the split and trying to get the music synced to the video. I don't feel that I got that part exactly right. Also some type of transition between the various music in the mashup would help, but I don't know how to do that either.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy it.