Today is our final week of visual language semester 1. We didn’t have a lecture so we just came to the labs.
Below is this weeks assignment completed. I had to draw a self portrait using pencil and also using typography which I did on photoshop.
Self Portrait
Typography Portrait
This week in visual language was all about typography.
A fantastic animated video briefly explaining typography.
A typeface is the design of an alphabet eg serif or times new roman also with its variants like bold, italic etc.
We looked at the history of typeface. The first based on an alphabet dating back to 1500bc from the middle east. As time went on and languages changed type changed too.
• Roman Capitols
• Uncial Script
• Half-uncial Script
• Carolingian Minuscule
• Humanist
• Gothic
• Venetian Antiqua
are all typefaces throughtout history.
Type is classified into serif or sans serif. The difference being serif has decorative embellishments on the end of lines and sans serif doesn’t.
Our assignment this week is to sketch a self portrait and then based on that picture to create a portrait using typography.
Heres an example I found online:
Hello again. We submitted our semiotic assignment today. Here are my 3 images. Larry David is:
evil
wealthy &
intelligent.
Evil Larry
Wealthy Larry
Intelligent Larry
For my assignment I have chosen Larry David who is an American actor, comedian, producer and director. He is most famous for co-creating and producing Seinfeld and also for writing and starring in HBO’s hit TV show ‘Curb your Enthusiasm’.
I chose Larry for a few reasons. Firstly, because I am a big fan of his, but also because of his own character. Larry portrayed as he is in these pictures is very ironic as he has built up his reputation to be something quite different. He is a man that is very much set in his ways, very particular and compulsive about even the smallest things. He is an extremely funny man and does not take himself serious which explains why the pictures are ridiculous. The pictures describe him as intelligent and wealthy (which he is) but show him being very serious and money hungry (which he is not). There is also a picture of him as an evil villain, which is tongue in cheek at a 1950s B movie and portrays Larry in a completely non-believable way.
Evil:
For the ‘evil’ picture I used a nuclear explosion background. This clearly shows a dark portrayal because of the huge flames and the dark red. I also gave him tinted glasses, which differ from the other pictures to give him that ‘villain’ look. The big red button and microphone give it the 1950s movie look.
Intelligent:
This was very easy because he is already giving the impression of a ‘thinking man’ by holding his chin and looking at the table. All I had to do was place a book in front of him to show he was deep in thought. I think the brightness and vastness of the sky behind him also gives him a slight godly impression as if looking down on us from above.
Wealth:
It is one thing placing money in front of him and another to place a pile of money in front. The pile suggests wealth at a greedy level. It suggests he has so much money he can just leave it lying around as he so wishes. The ‘Forbes’ and ‘Fortune 500’ magazines are symbols we all recognize to do with the highest levels of wealth in the world.
Side note: I chose the background colours as red, green and blue also to show the rgb colour model which is something we have been hearing a lot bout in different modules. 
Week 9 already. Today in class we looked briefly at our photos taken from our IMMA trip and reviewed digital imaging. This was about bitmap imaging such as jpegs, gifs and pngs. We also recapped on vectors.
The main subject today was semiotics. Semiotics is thought which calls attention to the formal signification, of meaning making, in culture.
eg. An image of a wide open lake could signify freedom or a sense of nature. The lake would be the signifier and the freedom or nature would be the signified.
We spoke about ideology in semiotics which is an almost sub conscious ‘common sense’ created in people from our cultural experiences. It is the way our brain interprets an image without actually thinking about it.
We then had a lab where we were using photoshop. We created a fruit face like this:
photoshopped
We received our next assignment which is due 27th November. The task is to take 3 celebrity portraits and associated an ideology with each one. masculinity, femininity and wealth.
This week we looked at bitmaps and vectors.
A bitmap (raster) is a large grid where each square is filled with a colour. Each square is a pixel and the more pixels the higher the resolution. Pixel is short for pixel element. The higher the resolution of an image, the more dots of colour, the better it will look.
Bitmap file extensions are: .gif .png .tff and .bmp.
Gif: Maximum of 256 colours, can be animated and are transparent.
Jpeg: Capable of displaying millions of colours.
Png: Similar to a gif.
Vectors are made of points rather than pixels and so can be made any size without losing quality. They are great for logos but not for photographs and can be very small file sizes.
We then had our first look at photoshop and its effects.
Mexican Ant
Ants in your Pants
Wrestling Ant
Hey. Last day for our assignment. 60 ants completed in some form or the other. Stuck them all together to be hung on the wall.
Had our lecture today too. We were taught about colour, its value, its saturation and hue.
This is a brilliant video I stumbled across and is definately worth a watch. Its called ’8 bit trip’ and is 1500 hours of moving legobricks and take photos of them.
lovely ant
It’s nearly a week now since we got this assignment and its quite difficult. How many ants can I portray before they start giving me nightmares. 20 done so far which took up my whole friday evening but at least its 1/3 completed.
“When I was five years old I saw an insect that had been eaten by ants and of which nothing remained except the shell. Through the holes in its anatomy one could see the sky. Every time I wish to attain purity I look at the sky through flesh”
Salvador Dali.
Ants
Hey. Week two is over. Visual language was quite hands on today. We each chose one from the following: ants, sun, sneaker, frog, gumball machine…. and we have to create 60 images using in my case an ant. 3 weeks to do it. Lets go!
What’s going on today everyone? Having the most fantastic friday possible?
Today we had visual imagery which was cool. We had a lecture first thing this morning with Niamh. It was way too early. She explained exactly what we are going to be doing for the semester which will involve assessments and a final written theory exam. She showed us her students work submitted last year which was the first year this course has run and also talked about what visual imagery is and that it is all around us on a daily basis.
We have now come up to our lab where I can see us spending a lot of time throughout the next few years. We had an overview of mac usage, logged into moodle and set up our bloggability .
We’ll see how it goes from here.
Peace.
