Does It Add Up?

Inspiration>Idea>Concept>Trial>Refine>Product

I feel like this is a process that I have been following for a while. Actually, this is the process that I want every project to utilize, but sometimes, I either make it so I don't have the time or I'm not motivated enough to go through all of the steps. Most of the time though, I think that I follow something close to this.

The discussion in class was very interesting. I was surprised how many people agreed on the same basic process. For some reason, I expected the conversation to result in many different types of processes. Getting to the order we have now seemed to almost be common sense. As for the discussion of New Media = Target Audience and Art = Me, I think that it is a fairly agreeable statement. I don't think that most artists think about their target audience extensively. I think that they more or less do whatever they want and hopefully someone else likes it. With New Media, I believe that people have to consider their target audience to be successful. I think that one of the reasons that people in New Media worry more about their target audience is because the internet is such a big place. Of course, being in New Media doesn't necessarily mean that your work/project is going online but their is definitely a high percentage of it. Anyway, with an audience the size of everyone on the internet, you have to shoot for specific goals or your project might end up with no one interested. I think that when you are too general with your potential audience, many people will see it as generic.

Now, on to the actual project. My inspiration for the project was my little brother, Mark. I chose him because I felt like doing something with Photoshop or Illustrator and I found a picture on his computer that seemed like it would be fun to mess with. I started this project with Photoshop. Here are my first two ideas/concepts.


First, I took the photo and made it black and white and left color in the reflection on the glasses. I was fairly happy with this one, but I thought it wasn't enough to turn in and thought that I would try some other stuff.

The second try was just me kind of messing with my brother. I basically made him look like he was from Twilight. It's a funny image, but after I completed it, I wasn't really happy with it and just thought that it worked better as a joke. It was also fairly easy and was really just a matter of making things lighter and darker and a little blur.
Finally, I took the original photo into Illustrator and traced it out. This is my favorite version of the picture. I view the other two pictures as trial and refinement and this is definitely the product. This might not be the hardest thing to do, but it did take some time. I also think that it has the best look of everything I've done to the picture.

The process worked pretty well for me and I believe it helped me end up with an interesting final product. Without using the process, I'm sure that my results wouldn't have been as good. I believe that this was a pretty good exercise and I plan on using this method on future projects.