Seminar Post 02: Crusty and Stubborn

So I'm trying very hard to take everything we talked about last time into account for the future of my project, some of which I feel places a few established elements of my project and turns it on it's head. Most of them vain, style choices which are more or less ornament in the big picture so I'll live with or without them. But the big issue is the repeated use of stick figures which I am currently in this love/hate relationship with if only for my own personal reasons. But I have made alternatives to just using Stick Figures last semester and I would like to take the chance to show you all this horrible thing I made. I say horrible in the most endearing way I possibly can.
What we have here is a vectorized photograph given a minimal amount of special effects. What is the point of doing this? It captures the same aesthetic I want in this serious, a sort of stale, wry humor with room to be considered slightly disturbing. Would this completely replace stencil figures? Absolutely not, but I believe the two can complement each other.

Now gradients were the big thing when we left things last semester for some of my pictures and after seeing some of the pieces I did with the new incentive to tone down excessive visual ornament, I think I might have gone a little too far with it.

I am not ashamed to say that there are a lot of thing wrong with this picture, tripping up on old issues that I should have been looking out for. But I would like to focus on the excess of gradients this time around rather than the other obvious horrors. The sky, the grass, the gray/concrete bottom and the figure, we have 4 different gradients running here at once to sort of flesh out this scene. When I made this, I felt this was a good "next step" to take with everything it has, making it looked more completed. However now I think it's a sort of visual trainwreck in all the wrong ways. Too much is going on, objects and colors alike. What I did was take the materials for two images and make one picture and all I accomplished in the end was making more work for myself. This image will most likely be deconstructed into a more simpler form. Doing objects also provides another means to make images without stencil men and feels like less of a stretch than the photo vectors.

The last thing I want to touch up on is our friend the stencil man. Despite how I have been talking somewhat negatively about it, I don't hate the idea of stencil figures in pictures. To be honest, I'm quite found of that aesthetic and will be keeping it and using it. Which also brings me up to the Keith Haring comparison, where his figures are much more lively and colorful than mine and that is completely fine. But I don't think I want to make the same kind of figures Haring's graffiti features, although I will begin to draw out ideas before taking them onto the computer with me.

So what I have learned?

• Photo vectors might be fun to do more of. We'll see if they can get along with the other pictures. Just doing stand alone objects is another option.
  
• Gradients used in excess will kill the image, best to back a few steps from them
• More Sketching, but the stencils will ultimately stay close (if not exactly) to how they are right now.

Still aiming for 100, let's see what I can do.