the after-thought

link to the zine: click here 
(If you click on the cover photo, tumblr will pull it up in a shadowed window. From there, just click in the center of each page and it will take you to the next one. Click in the shadowed are to exit.)
 
1. Your concept? In 3-4 sentences, explain the core of your idea.
I flipped through idea after idea with the concept of this zine. I ended up choosing to use pages from my journal as materials and each excerpt is very personal. It's titled the after-thought because I essentially took out these pages and drew or wrote what should go with them. Some of the pages I haven't read in years, and others are more recent. I had almost forgotten about a lot of them. The project really turned into an opportunity for growth and rehabilitation from things in my past, and a reminder that they are just my past and I have a whole future ahead of me.

2. Mediums/Programs/Materials to be used?
I took sections of writing from my journal and taped them to pieces of sketchbook paper. I placed the words over drawings and sketches drawn directly on the paper or cut out and taped to it as well. I also wrote on the pages with ink pens.

This/these mediums are the best choice for my concept because >
I do most of my art outside of the computer and I think by drawing them and scanning them in the zine is be stronger than if I worked 100% digitally. You can see how my drawing style changes as well as my handwriting and it shows a more personal aspect with every page.

3. How will you use/approach the concept of TIME in your project?
I didn't put the journal pages in the order that they happened. Some of them may have ended up that way, but it was unintentional. It's all about placing thoughts from the present over feelings from the past.

4. Describe what personal research will you conduct to enhance your project?
I looked at some online zines and a few that I or my friends own, but I mostly just dug through my journals and rehashed my past with myself.

Intro To Digital Art: Familiar Filters

Racing Thoughts from Haley Ashton on Vimeo.

Title: Racing Thoughts
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3. My video is very nonlinear. I basically used the way my thoughts run through my head when compiling sound and video. I tend to bounce from topic to topic with no regard to logical order when I let my thoughts go where they want to.
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Audio #1: Mash Up Assignment

Link to .mp3 on Soundcloud: Women's Work

(album cover and self reflection in progress, sorry it's taking me so long)

 I'm pretty happy with how this song came out. One of the hardest parts was finding more dialogue to mix into the music. I couldn't seem to get many that would fit together with the rest of what I had. I also wasn't sure about whether or not I had the pop song layout right. I made sure it wasn't just the same thing repeating over and over though. I really enjoyed making this, though. It was really interesting to figure out how the loops and sound effects would work together. It was tough sometimes to make it all sound uniform but it was nothing some volume fading and a little overlapping couldn't fix.

Set #4: Culture Jams & Free Assignment

Set 3: Self Reflection/Critique

Historical relevance & Self-Reflections/Critique

Set 3: Faux Historical Documents; Part 2

Rat Attack!

Set 3: Faux History Documents; Part 1

 The War on Women

Set 2: Face Composite

I used the lasso tool to take different pieces from each person's face to put in the composite. Each photo in the set of 5 has red circles around the parts that were put on the center photo. I mostly used the patch tool and a soft eraser. I also used the healing brush tool, the clone stamp, and changed the color balance on some of the facial features. I had a few other photos that I used but it was mainly trial and error. Certain things didn't line up or looked very wrong, proportionately, with the rest of the face. I had each person stand in front of a white screen and shot them all at the same exposure. I tried to make sure they were all facing forward but there was a slight amount of tilt in some faces that wasn't terribly hard to fix with some rotating. I probably could have made the eyebrows blend a little better with the skin and also should have tried a few other eyes. Challenging myself a little more could have been a good idea with different skin tones and genders as the final product has girls with mostly the same skin color with minimal variance. I think the lips and nose were incorporated the best out of all of the features I added. They worked really well with the original face yet still made something seem slightly off.

Set 2: Celebrity Face Composite

Rooney Mara + Anne Hathaway + Ellen Page

Ewan MacGregor + Twiggy

I think picking celebrities to morph together was the hardest part about this. I couldn't decide who would go well together. I started going through favorite movies and took actresses and an actor from them, plus Twiggy. Putting Twiggy and Ewan together was really interesting because it just made him look like he had on makeup and was pouting. I probably could have made her lips blend into his face better but it was difficult with the facial hair. Combining the others for the piece I like best was a lot of fun. Three of my favorite actresses morphed together just looks incredibly creepy. I think the fact they all had extremely close skin tones and were photographed in similar lighting helped out a lot. The weirdness is a bit captivating in this one I think. I should have fixed the shadow on the right side of the lips in this one. These two celebrity composites were made using mostly the patch tool, transform tool, clone stamp, and healing brush. I used a soft eraser to get rid of major parts of faces that were pasted onto others.

Digital Imaging & Meaning, Set 1. Silhouettes.

Silhouette #1

Office Space

9"x11"

Object used: Stapler.

 

For the most part in my first silhouette assignment I did a lot of copying and pasting. I used the transform tool quite a bit as well, but more for changing angles than anything else. To make the silhouette of the stapler I used the lasso tool to select only the stapler and then deleted the background using the inverse selection. I locked the layer transparency and use date brush tool to make the entire object solid. I thought my craft could've been better. I think I may have rushed through it too fast. When I was trying to think of what objects to use I was running through significant objects from movies in my head and I thought it would be neat to make an office or cubicle out of the red swingline stapler in Office Space. I think the parts that work best are the computer and desk. The rest could be reworked or reorganized and look much better. The clock just looks like a blob on the wall, so I need to add something to make it stand out more as what it's supposed to be. I might be beneficial to make the scene bigger and out of more staplers.

Silhouette #2

Teeth

10"x10"

Object used: Tooth.

I have a fascination with teeth, so I incorporated them into this assignment. I found an image on google and cut the tooth out of it with the lasso tool. I locked the transparency and made it all a solid color and cleaned up the edges a little I decided on the colors because the brightness reminds me of sticky chewy candy colors. I started with the pink and blue-green scheme then added filters and messed with the hue. The other color combination I really liked was red and green but it didn't give off the candy vibe I wanted. Both versions are shown but the pink and blue-green is my favorite of the two. I think I did a pretty good job of showing foreground and background by alternating the colors as well as making the ones on the bottom layers fade into the background. I tried to make the pink stand out enough without completely hurting anyone's eyes. The teeth looked a bit flat so I added the accent lines on the top of each one to give them a more 3D feel. I think the way the teeth fee into the background works really nicely. It may have helped to add shadows or something to help separate the layers of teeth a little better.

Digital Imaging & Meaning, Set 1. Digital Collages.

Digital Collage #1

The Great Cover-Up

10"x15"

This piece began while I was searching through magazines looking for things to scan for the assignment. I kept coming across make-up ads that really frustrated me so I started tearing them out. Most of the major images in the piece are scanned images but a few things definitely came from the Internet. I wanted the cutout pieces to look very choppy like I had physically cut them out and pasted them together on paper. I put bags under the eyes of this pastiche style face and put crows feet on her too. I wanted to emphasize the features the way the magazine ads emphasize the need to hide or get rid of them. I put paintbrush marks over some of the words to look like make-up as well. The whole piece is a statement on how the media really loves to tell women that they need to do certain things so they can be attractive to society regardless of how beautiful they are. They hold every woman up to this standard of beauty that the models wouldn't even achieve without photoshop. I probably could have improved the piece by making multiple versions that varied a lot. The other versions I made just had small differences and just made it look a little awkward.

Digital Collage #2

 Sweet Tooth

14"x9.5"

For this piece I used a lot of pictures from the Internet along with downloaded brushes and some text I made all of these different pictures into a mouth. The word SWEET has parts erased to look like its rotting away as your teeth would if you ate sugar all the time. The rows of teeth are made of 4 or 5 individual molar images that I cut and pasted together, then warped to give a curved look like they're actually in a mouth. I had to mess with the hues of everything to make it all look like candy. I wanted it to be made up almost entirely of bright childlike colors. I think I could have spent more time on the gums to help them blend into the teeth like gums actually do. I think the lips might also be a little too much but I haven't decided the best way to fix all of that quite yet.