Reflective Essay - Portraits and Letters

In a technical sense I would have to say that I learned the most while doing the portraits. With my self portrait, it took so long to get the lighting just right in my very dark apartment. And only after shooting about 50 shots was I able to get a clear reflection of myself TV. When I photographed my friend Jake (the climber), my flash completely blew out his hand so there was nothing but a white blob that needed to be completely reconstructed. I found the hardest thing about working on a photograph is that there are always continuous tones and any paint you put on the canvas is obviously not part of the original. This made it very hard therefore to reconstruct his hand without it looking like I had copied and pasted an image of Bart Simpson’s hand clutching the rock.

The ‘other’ photo I shot was a set-up. I told her about the project and that I’d love it if I could take her photo as my stranger pic. I’m not sure if she really got what I was talking about but she let me take the photo none-the-less. The first thing I did was crop it so that it wasn’t a full body shot. She told me that I needed to crop it so it didn’t show her belly. She hadn’t been expecting me to take the full shot and she said she would have sucked in had she known. It had been raining when I took the photo but her personality in the shot come across as very warm so I raised the color temperature up a bit.

My favorite letter-form was the Orange “J”. The pipe jumped out at me on my way to the rock gym to photograph my friend and since I had my camera with me I took a quick shot. It’s funny that those unexpected photos that have no planning or thought put into them, sometimes make you favorite shot of all. Once I got it into Photoshop I realized that it wasn’t obvious enough as a letter so I isolated it with the lasso tool and then inversed the selection and made everything else black and white. This along with some experimentation with contrast made the photo to my liking and officially complete.

Letters in our Habitat

Cereal "G"



SOU Bush

Shrubber "E"

Furilla "A"

Orange "J"

Portrait of Other

A strange friend of a friendly stranger

Self Portrait

Bowman

Portrait of Friend

The Ascent

Hoiland's Letter Project - Reflective Essay

I didn’t have to search for too long on any of the projects. Most of the time I would briefly scroll through the type faces and after seeing one or two I would think – I can make that work. Once they were on the canvas I’d rasterize them and then experiment with size rotation and color until I came up with a semblance of an idea. One of the challenges I faced was the color difference between the lab computers and my home computer. When I was working with “An Even Forest” on the lab computers every color appeared bright and complimentary, but when I downloaded it at home it looked like a very dead forest in the middle of a snot colored desert. However, this could just be the difference between my objective eye and my eye as the immediate artist. I might have been so involved in the making of it that I forgot it was no longer beautiful.

I had a plan to choose every letter very carefully with significance in my life in some way but by the second piece I scratched that notion and just chose whatever letter looked cool on the keyboard. So I started with a single letter on the canvas and went from there.

I would have to go with “Davyd and the ‘Y ith”. When Professor Inada was talking about scale contrast in lecture on Monday this image popped into my head. I didn’t know at the time that our next project would be about letters, but image that came to me was a large dragon that knew it was the king of it’s world until it looked over and there was the head of an enormous dragon that barely fit in the frame. I still wanted to incorporate this in my piece somehow so I translated my idea to a piece using only the letter Y. I knew that I was finished when The ‘Y ith’ had her scales.

Letter Project #5

Slightly R tistic

Letter Project #4

An Even Forest

Letter Project #3

The Red Tessssssssssalation

Letter Project #2

Sssssseriously trippy

Letter Project #1

Davyd and the "Y ith"

Hoiland's Toy Project - Reflective Essay

My Cubee began with the simple dilemma of not knowing which color to choose for the body. Once it became apparent I was incapable of making such a tedious decision I did the only rational thing and refused to decide at all by choosing tie-dye. The dreadlocks seemed only natural once the shirt was in place, and then the purple hemp pants after that was a no-brainer.

The color of the skin took me a while and so did making the dreadlocks, especially making them look somewhat layered and multi-dimensional. Skin is tricky. It can come out looking like an orange if you aren’t careful. I messed with the palette until I found the right hue to make a believable hippie tan and then lowered the saturation. That along with the lighter value made it look more like a humanoid and less like a newly painted wall with a mouth and eyes. Whilst making the dreadlocks I decided that the easiest way to show they weren’t goldilocks curls was to pull them up to the top of the head and then have a wrap of hemp yarn coming out as if the cubee had put up his dreads for the occasion.

I can imagine my cubee on the streets of cubeland standing on some street corner holding a pen and a clip board trying to get people to sign a petition to save the whales. I guess I’ve stereotyped him a bit. He could really be anyone who attends the Oregon Country Fair or someone who just digs the feel of hemp against their legs and a burst of color on their chest and who doesn’t mind the upkeep of a head full of dreads. So basically, any good Ashlander.

Toy Project

There's a hippie boxed up inside of me

Hoiland's Reflective Essay

I have to attribute everything I knew when starting this project to my hours spent doodling on Windows Paint in grade school. That knowledge helped me quite a bit but there was definitely more to learn. Layers were unfamiliar territory and they turned out to be essential in all of my scratch works. In my 3^rd project, the ‘forest’, every color of tree was on a different layer and I wouldn’t have been able to create it without the layer tool. The lasso tool and the rotate selection were also some fun gadgets to explore. Just sitting down and playing with Paintshop for a few hours increased my speed and skill as a graphic artist. There were times when a complicated series of actions led to a pleasing final result, but just as often I was surprised at how the simple tools could go a long way. There seems to be infinite possible results and a million techniques and directions to get there.

I never started with a plan… On all three I just randomly chose a color and tool and made a shape. A blue rotated rectangle for the ‘Hinge Hound’ that ended up being the jaw, a teal circle that started the ‘Cry Baby’s’ head, and a yellow triangle to begin my forest of color. After the head was made in ‘Cry Baby’ (at the time just a solitary teal circle on a blank canvas), I panted a black ellipse inside it, which informed me I was making a screaming person. After the teeth were put in it was clear that this was a large crying baby and the following arms, filthy shirt, and legs seemed obvious. The background was quite by accident; some color fading tool that if held in a certain way made black and white stripes.

I think my favorite image was scratch project #3: "Soon To Be Field" – Forest. I say WAS because I actually had about a half an hour of unsaved work that was lost from it and I had to send in an unfinished version. At the time when the software freaked out and I lost my work I had it to a where it was a lot more detailed with a more populated forest and a cut down tree lying by the stump.

Scratch Project 3

"Soon To Be Field" - Forest

By Sam Hoiland

Scratch Project 2

Cry Baby

By Sam Hoiland

Scratch Project 1

Hinge Hound

By Sam Hoiland