Self Evaluation

I have been asked to evaluate my own art work that I have produced in this unit, therefore I will be explaining the reason for choosing specific tools as well as how I used my knowledge and skills to overcome certain problems.

Generating ideas for creating logo designs was not really a big problem for me in this unit because I think I am quiet imaginative and creative, especially when it comes to designing things for games. Since that I play lot of games, most of my design were based on weapons as well as wolf because it is one of my favourite animal which I think is widely used for games.

At the beginning I have used wolf and mountains images from Google to create some logos which I would not be capable to draw either by hand or on the computer, this allowed me to generate some ideas for a logo. However I realised that I should not have used randomly images from Google because you cannot know whether you are allowed to copy images and modify which could be copyright issue. Therefore I have not used those logos containing such images for my final logo and splash art, instead I have research free images on the internet that you are allowed to use without any worries. The website that I have used is http://www.stockfreeimages.com/ . Below are the images that I have rejected:

(Edited: 29/05/14)

I cut the body to have only the head

This is the wolf picture that I got from Google Image

The head has been modified by adding some effects

This is the other image that I have not used

Since that I am designing a splash art for game company, real picture would not suit because most of games out there are 3D elements with texture making it kind of real but not as in the real world, and other games are based on cartoon or anime arts. Therefore I have modified a lot the images by adding effects so that they are appropriate for type of game like AvAlon.

One of the main tools that I used in this unit to create things is probably “Pen tool” from Photoshop, it allowed me to draw things such as sword and axe easily because I was able to modify the shapes and edge of those weapons freely and multiple of time without any worries (undo).

When editing in Photoshop you have layers where you add elements such as effects, shapes, or even other images, then you able to hide any layers in order to work on specific layer (to make editing easier). I took advantage of this feature that Photoshop gives because I am able to keep my changes and original separated by duplicating layers. This technique allowed me to get back my previous designs when I made changes that I did not like, which I would have been able to if everything was in one layer.

One of my favourite tools for modifying the shape of an image is probably liquify because it allows me to change freely any area of my images, which I think it adds them a special touch such as spiky outer or mixing colours and elements, or even completely change the images’ appearance. In addition to quick selection tool which I used mostly to remove some parts of images which I did not like or bits that were not appropriate for making changes, this technique was used for removing the body the wolf image, so that I can use only the head.

I used circle and rectangle into some area of my logos because I wanted to have prefect circles and rectangle such as black circle for the background of certain logos which were making them look more as a logo than just a simple image. Furthermore I was able to make them transparent which I used in my promotional banner to make an overlay colour above another image.

The reason I choose to make a promotional banner above others was because I am frequent with advertising banners because they are all over the internet, especially when I visit games’ websites. So I was more confident for my first splash art and I thought I will be able to create a decent banner for promoting my game.

For this splash art I had to choose my logo design and some rejected design to create the banner, so some decisions were required such as which designs were good for the banner, which layers should be kept and whether colour had to be changed, etc. Since that most of my designs were based on weapons such as swords, axe and shield, grouping and adding them into my promotional banner was not that hard. However some changes were needed, size was the major problem because all my design were supposed to be a size of 500x500 pixels and the banner size is 1500x500, so I had to resize the images to fit them appropriately to the banner and also in order to include more designs than 3.

To enhance the look of my banner I also modified some of my designs such as the shape of some images as well as some layers, some layers were not proper to other designs, mostly because of colours and some were kind of repetitive (similar to some designs).

In my opinion the thing that restricted my skills from creating decent designs was probably because of not having lot of knowledge and skill in Photoshop since it was the first time I was using it. However now I learned lot of skills and technique in Photoshop which I probably would have difficulties to learn if I was learning if on my own.