Author: Adam Chou

Website:  http://imanas.shanghai.nyu.edu/~ac6596/Portfolio_Project/

Reflection:

I enjoyed working on this project but felt as though much of my hard labor came from a lot of guesswork. The majority of the project included a brutal cycle of me forgetting the functions of lines of code, and then having to look up functions and playing around with values grew tiresome. This, combined with combing through my source code, made the process of creating my project more cumbersome than I liked.  However, I feel as though I was better prepared for this assignment after the CSS exercise, as the practice definitely helped me to understand the classification and division system better. With practice, I hope i will get faster at coding, as well as more efficient. 

I will not lie though, I feel like my project is quite basic in comparison to the others that have already posted. However, for now, I will be complacent and settle for what I have.

Somethings that I would like to later add on would be the incorporation of multiple pages, as well as a better idea for content. I have a lot of writing that hasn’t been published yet, so I was thinking that I would make this portfolio much like an online book for my unfinished work. This is for the future though, when I learn a bit of javascript as well as more commands for CSS and HTML.

To be completely honest, I have read this book before, so I already knew about all of the techniques and sense of space discussed in the book. However, on my second reading, I started to pay more attention to the form and presentation of the book. What was particularly interesting about the four chapters (and the book itself) is not just the presentation style, but also the content of the piece. The history that we know of (as described in the book) is that comics are a particularly western invention, where the combination/usage of words with pictures was first recorded. It Is, however, odd to me that although these western influences are used to accentuate the definition used, there is no mention towards attempts of what might have been a comic. When I speak of this, I think of Chinese calligraphy and other pictorial – based languages. Perhaps it is by training or simply medium, but to which what can be considered what should not be limited by simple geography and history. But then again, I am most likely talking too much on something I know little about.

Oddly enough however, he does illustrate the differences, but not the development on the eastern traditions, where there is little comparison between Japanese as well as Korean, or perhaps Chinese comics. A little more diversity would have been appreciated. There is, however, a distinct tone to which east has influenced west, which means that this narrative is mostly centered on the western style of painting. I do, however know quite a bit on some of the defined terms: icon – medium – message so I guess I will speak on that. I find it limiting that the association of these symbols are restricted to explain a comic, when they can easily (and should only be) used to describe art as a whole. The entire theory of communications is entirely dependent on the framing of the image, to which the artist does well, but also miscommunicates at the same time.

I can appreciate the sequential method to which the artist uses in order to convey the message. I suppose that it is working off of a basic understanding that we know how to read the comic, much like how Japanese manga needs you to understand that you read from right to left, instead of left to right. I find it fascinating to think about the way that the presentation has been both deliberate and accidental. An example would be my beforementioned analysis of audience and media. Then again, this could be my odd interpretations of the messages that I have, as I often find my mind wandering to other subjects (related to the topic) but tangential at best.

My project was made in photoshop, utilizing the elements below.



Project:

Process:

In all honesty, I chose this idea as an experiment. I took three organic ideas (the moon, the cityscape and a rainbow) and combined them. The rainbow (as well as the extension of the sky) however, took a lot of effort to make as natural as possible. Most of my time and effort was used with the blur, dodge and smudge tool to make the sky and the rainbow as neat as possible. I also added a mask to (as well as lowered the opacity of) the moon in order to make the object (although large in size) seem farther away from the city. I did this in order to make it seem more menacing due to the contrast of space. 

Additionally, if it is not clear, I rotated the rainbow 90 degrees right, deleted the sky and used the blur tool in order to incorporate the colors into the sky.