ART2301 - Homework - Stuff I Want to Learn Pt.1

I think it's traditional, as a christening no doubt, to welcome the world to a new blog when it is birthed.  So... welcome!  This blog is being setup as a part of the ART2301 (Digital Art I) class I'm taking this semester.  The instructor has asked us to set this up to track our research, progress, and work throughout the course so that he may keep an eye one us and that we may more easily communicate with our classmates.  However, if I can muster the will, I may keep this going for the rest of my time at university.  We'll see.

For now he has given us an assignment to find 10 examples of digital art that we want to learn to make.  Here are my first five:

1) A composite photograph by Homato [link].  This image layers several photos of the same scene to create a crowd (cloud?!) of airplanes.  This many airplanes would have required several hours or even days to take all of the shots yet the exposure on each seems to be basically the same.  Learning to match exposure between images that were taken with slightly, or even drastically, different lighting conditions is important to my work as a photographer.

2) This next image, titled Snaippo, is also a composite though it is taken in a different direction.  It is by an artist going by the name of "humandescent" on Deviantart [link]. What I appreciate most with this type of composite is the artist's ability to combine two extremely different creatures into something new and even believable.

3) Next is a type of moving image called a cinemagraph.  This one, originally a series of stills of model Coco Rocha, was found on Cinemagraphs.com and is by the artists Jamie Beck and Kevin Burg.  These images use skillfully crafted animated GIFs that bring a single moment to life not unlike the moving photos of the Harry Potter films.

4) This image is a shameless plug as it is my own.  It was taken in Dublin in 2009 shooting across the River Liffey.  However, this image is not the original.  A pre-fab filter was used to make it look like it was taken on a toy camera when, in reality, an iPhone 3G was used.  This style is exceptionally trendy today but I want to be able to create custom effects for my images that set the mood of the story I'm trying to tell--and not necessarily just those of the hipster variety.

5) This last image in Pt.1 of Stuff I Want to Learn is by the artist Zippo12, also on DeviantArt [link].  The image itself is just okay but it does illustrate a technical ability I wish to attain.  The shapes and pseudo-text (runes?) are created, placed, and grouped very precisely.

Tomorrow, Pt. 2!