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I got some awesome feedback from my Design Instructor on my last Visit Pandora guide cover, and here’s the new and improved version.
What I did:
One of my favorite movies is Before Sunset. For one of the Photoshop exercises, I created an imaginary poster for this movie. I wanted to show the two lead characters, in fact the only ones, in a silhouette-ish layer to convey the idea that they have been living in the shadow of their encounters 9 years earlier, and that they had missed an appointment with each other. There are also some emotions for them to sort through. The movie takes place in Paris, hence the Seine river and the Eiffel Tower. I wanted to make the sky a dark blue as sunsetting sky would be, but blue for optimism, the idea of “blue sky ahead”. I wanted to make the movie title “Before Sunset” a part of the horizon, as the sun would be.
Before I say anything, let me first clarify that I’m calling it the “Asian” pressure because 1) I’m Asian, and I’m writing from a personal experience, and 2) The people in the story are Asian. I’m well aware that it’s not just an Asian thing, so please feel free to insert_your_label_here. As you probably already know, the female figure skating Olympics Gold medalist is Kim Yu-Na, from South Korea, and the Silver medalist is Mao Asada, from Japan. They are both gorgeous and talented young women at the lovely age of 19, full of aspiration, determination, skills and talent, and external pressure. Pressure, pressure, pressure. Watching the Figure Skating event, I couldn’t stop thinking about the enormous weight and burden that these women carry on their shoulders from their country. When I heard about angry letters that Kim Yu-Na would get from her “fans” if she won 2nd place, a wave and anger and sadness washed over me. It felt all too familiar. When Kim Yu-Na won, I was super happy for her, but then I thought of Mao Asada, and what reaction she will receive for “losing”. I’m reminded now of a funny thing a friend once told me, that his mom considers him a failure because he’s a Computer Scientist and not a Doctor. When will we stop the blaming and shaming of people that we think *should* do what we want them to do and be where we want them to be? When will we accept things as they are? Is that even remotely a feasible concept?
Tonight’s lecture was on using Adobe Bridge as a Digital Asset Management tool, and one exercise was on the use of shadow and lighting. I was to transform this room into anything I wanted:  Just another empty apartment room. I thought, hey, why not my own Yoga space? And so, making it into my dream yoga room, I did.  My dream space I used the view of the Olympic mountains and the Puget Sound as inspiration. Actually, the wallpaper might be a little too “girly” for my taste, but it looked really cool when I “put it on”. The teardrop lamps are sorta novel, so I experimented with that. Tricks used:
I thought the timing of this exercise was impeccable, because over at my Yoga Blog, I just wrote about something along the same line of working with lighting and shadows. Sometimes, “she moves in mysterious ways”… What if the Department of Tourism needed a Tourist brochure? Here’s something I thought would be fun to make to play around with Filters.  A Pandora Visitors Guide Brochure Cover Filters used:
Images aren’t mine, I just cropped and filtered them. Thank you to all the artists for putting them out there so I can crop and photoshop to my heart’s content. What are your thoughts? Would you visit? I worked on this ad today, using basic typography tricks including Type Masking, Drop Shadowing, and Warping.  Ask your doctor today. Drugs for Facebook and Twitter forthcoming. I’ve been playing/working with layers, and here’s a sample.  A lodge cabin before surgery And… here’s what the post-surgery Heidi Montag version looks like:  If you can landscape in real life, there's always Photoshop Some things I did:
What’s your feedback for me to improve on? This is what a friend of my told me when we were in college. He was in the Art School studying Visual Design, and he said that he can’t look at Maxim or any of those skin magazines the same way anymore. “All I see is Photoshop retouching!”, he’d exclaim. And oh, yes, I do know what he means. Here’s before  A small child with a rock, and a couple scratches Here’s after a couple strokes of the healing brush:  Okay, now there's a face a mother could love, right? I used a couple things to retouch the image: I, like… oh, 60, 70, 80% of the world, loved Avatar and plan on using what’s left of our 401k to see it a couple more times in theater. Sure, there are crappy dialogs (”You’re not in Kansas anymore”, wow, never heard *that* before), predictable plot (sure, you can think of it as Pocahontas or Dances with Wolves in space, or even Lawrence of Arabia, if you want to), and typical James Cameron material (if you play the Avatar theme song “I See You” a couple times, god-awful memories of “My Heart Will Go On” will resurface and make you cry). Okay, that’s all I want to say about Avatar for now. Something that made me go “whoa” tonight was something I read on Wikipedia about Sam Worthington.
Whoa.
Throughout this past week and a couple before that, I have been randomly running into the concept of “happiness” everywhere I looked. My guess is, because it’s the end of the year and also the end of what TIME Magazine called The Decade from Hell (geez, sensational much?), a whole lot of us are reflecting more than usual, and movies like Up in the Air have got us asking, “What am I doing with my life?”, and “What is it all for?” On Friday, I read the article This is the Greatest Good by Richard Layard, author of Happiness: Lessons from a New Science, who suggests:
Now, I won’t go into what exactly constitute happiness, because that in itself is a giant black hole, and it’s the crux of the argument that what Richard Layard proposes is not practical, nor desired, as this dude said in the counter-essay: The pursuit of happiness is a fool’s errand.
I very much see where these two guys are coming from. Today my friend Andy briefly talked about why we haven’t been out and about partying as much like we used to, and I mentioned what my senior yoga teacher Judith Lasater said in an interview:
It’s not a stretch to say that we are all pursuing something called happiness. We all want to have fun, to enjoy life, to be happy. Why then, does happiness seem so elusive? I have a couple theories, but I want to hear from you. What do you think? What’s your definition of happiness? And according to that, are you happy?  You don't want to see my unhappy face, trust me. |
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Copyright © 2010 Nikki Chau - All Rights Reserved |
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