Creative Commons – Protect Your Creativity and Imagination

For this blog, I chose Attribution-NonCommercial  4.0 International Creative Commons License because of some original works published on this blog. With this license, readers are able to be allowed to share and adapt the material in any medium or format.

This license allows the readers or viewers to do:

Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format

Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material

for any purpose, even commercially.

The licensor cannot revoke these freedoms as long as you follow the license terms.

Specifically, the license can protect and spread my creativity and imagination in the premise of not breaking the laws for the readers. Anyone who reads my blog can copy and paste the material I provided from the post, provided by all means links back to my blog or post my blog address, rather than to use directly without my permission. In addition, it does not allow to use my material on blog to commit commercial use since I do not like anyone make money using my idea without my permission or involvement and engagement. So the ideal way is to inform me before using it.

Spam Cleanup

I reserve the right to immediately delete any blogs and comments that are inappropriate. Bullying, scolding, discrimination and porny information will be deleted and even report to WordPress official. I will clean up spam comments or replies on time regularly.

 

Our awareness of Copyright needs to be cultivated quickly for the people who are working or would work on media. I quoted some requirements from Australian Copyright Council,

Using copyright material for research or study

As a result of special provisions in the Copyright Act, if you use copyright material for the purpose of research or study, you do not infringe copyright, provided your use is “fair”. Whether or not your use is fair will depend on all the circumstances. A “reasonable portion” of text or notated music is below 10%.

Digital Drawing – paint your world

 

Digital drawing is a very interesting process to create an image that you want. I have quite a lot of digital drawing in the past when my bachelor was animation. Initially, I used Photoshop as bitmap tool and AI(adobe illustrator) as vector tool to draw original painting design because adobe softwares have strong compatibility and thousand of brushes can be used in Photoshop. At the last semesters of bachelor, I and my group mates found a more useful drawing tool called SAI that can create softer colors and smoother brush strokes. At that time, we use SAI combined with TBA (Toom Boom Animate) that is a professional 2D software to make animation like Flash, to make a wonderful animation. By the way, I prefer to draw on the screen with the help of Tablet and Stylus, Intuos products are ideal choices.

Generally, the most difficult part of digital drawing is to convey aesthetic using simple elements. If we’ve mastered all the skills of digital drawing as a premise, how to draw a painting beautifully is depending on a person’s drawing ability. With the software, it doesn’t mean that we can mishandle different elements on an image and not to abide by color rules.

Vector VS Bitmap   which is the best?
Advantage of bitmap images

• In paint programs, you will see what you are getting, usually in real time when wielding a paint brush
• easier to create the appearance of natural media such as areas of watercolors bleeding into each other
• bitmaps format can be read and modified by bitmap-based files such as jpeg, png, which are common formats interchange file formats. But vector files only can be edited by the fixed software like AI or Corel Draw.

Advantages of vector images

• pretty much resolution-independent. it’s impossible to rescale up an image no matter what the size it is. That’s the reason why an animation of Flash format is much smaller than that of avi or mov.
• we can specify that the bounding lines are automatically closed even when not invisible, so avoiding problem of painting flooding out. When I used TBA that is vectorial animation software, it’s convenient to fill color because of closing the bounding lines automatically.
• shapes easily edited
• smaller output files for online use

I utilized two softwares to draw different images,

 

Pen tool of Photoshop is applied to draw an logo that is last letter of my given name MING. When doing this, I layered different colours as a single layer, which is easier to be edited.

 

This image is drawn by Illustrator. You can find that the shapes edited by this software are smoother and sharp.

This is a tutorial that teach us how to draw realistic eyes with Tablet in Photoshop.

 

Image Editing Software – my old friend

For me, Photoshop is a great software to manipulate images for an artist. I started working with  Photoshop at the age of 15 in secondary school. Because my major is animation in bachelor, Photoshop as a largely powerful software that developed by Adobe, can be used to play nice with other applications like After Effects, 3Ds max, Maya and so forth. Using photoshop, a lot of time is saved for modeling by texturing simultaneously. When I worked out my bachelor  graduate work, I used photoshop to adjust the local details after 3D rendering. You can get any unexpected result with the help of photoshop.

(This is a construction effect chart of my uni that I made one-year ago using Photoshop. That is a complex making process. I used 3Ds Max to render a high-resolution image that focus on the construction itself, and then render a multi-channel color image imported to Photoshop to adjust detail. The trees, pedestrians and some other elements are composited in Photoshop.)

I am so familiar with Photoshop, so I decided to download GIMP to have a try.

Actually, GIMP is quite similar to Photoshop. The layout, tools, layer window, special effects all look the same. I explored several tools such as scaling, color balance, curves. I found that if you can master Photoshop well, GIMP is not a problem for you. In addition, the user interface of GIMP is more intuitive that is easier for users to manipulate. And GIMP is presented in two forms, single mode and multiple window mode. GIMP has a selection of smart tools, which can enable users to do the things that otherwise wobble be time-consuming or impossible. These tools include the clone tool that copies pixels using a brush, healing brush which can copy pixels from an area and corrects the tone and color and more examples like this. All in all, GIMP is also an useful editing software that is similar to Photoshop.

I’ve learned this tutorial before making the poster.

I used GIMP to make a poster that promote an AA(Alcoholics Anonymous) campaign. It reflects that two alcoholic divers struggle to escape the beer.