Finally finished; A journey to the end of Visual Journalism.

For our final project in Visual Journalism Spring 2011, we were assigned quite a great deal of work. The decision was made a couple of weeks ago for the students in the class to interview our assigned faculty member. The catch: they are all international. Each student was given someone who had been born/raised in a different country. I found that the woman our teacher had given me was extremely appropriate and I was quite excited to get a move on with my article. Her name is RoseAnna Mueller and she was born in Italy.
Her story was one that capitvated me from the moment we began. She was born in a small hilltop town and raised in a large fishing port town. She told me of her family, what her father did, their journey to America, when her brother was born, her interests in the Italian/Sicilian culture, and where she is with it today.
We were given the assignment to interview our people, write an article, make a magazine layout including headlines, captions, photos, photo editing, sidebars, and much more. Since I was so interested in my person, I found this final project to be easier than what I expected. I wanted to keep the pages simple and let the story and photos captivate you. I didn't make the background a flashy color, or much of anything for that matter. I wanted her story to speak to my readers for itself, but with a little bit of a visual aspect, since it was required.
Also, to make the magazine pages not all the same from every student, our teacher said to put the headline not at the very top of the page. After further review, I found I was able to do that since most of the other students had already put their headlines away from the top. I think the way I wanted my layout to look, very standard and clean, very basic, nothing as I said before too flashy.

Creation of a homepage; our midterm

For our midterm, we were to create a fake homepage for a website using original photos from ourselves. Since I am big into music photojournalism, I thought this was a perfect opportunity to utilize what I already had with bands in the death metal music scene.
The website features specific bands that are death metal, and related genres. 
The logo is a periodic table of elements, and called "The Middle Of The Table" because metals are in the middle of the table itself and I thought it was a cute and nerdy twist to the topic.
I used the band's actual logos to give a unique feel to each one.

Restoration

For our most recent project, we had to restore an old photo that Elio had give us. To do this, we were given a photo from the early 1900s that was destroyed by moth damage and decoloration. This is the original.

What I did to restore the photo was fill all of the holes, adjusted all of the levels, darked the hair, lightened the eyes, etc... The photo looks like new but keeps the quality of the original.

Warm

For this piece, it was just like the cool tone one, using the original template for our black and white projects, but turning it into warm tones.
Since the cool tone project was not as vibrant, I wanted to do something I'm usually not familiar with and technically not very fond of and make this extremely bright. Each color in this piece has its own place and I think it works well together.
I utilized the splatter pattern I had and turned it red, like blood. Very Dexter Morgan if you ask me.

Copy Cat

    For this assignment, we were given a page from a magazine that we chose at random. We had to replicate what we saw into our own work. The difficulty about this was the clarity of such small photos and also making the phone look identical to what the story was, which happened to be an interview. 
    I found this to be a good exercise in using all of the fundaments we have been learning in class.

Cool tones and much more.

For this assignment, we were to use the same composition we had for the black and white one. The wide range of colors that are included in "cool" tones gave me the opportunity to play with not just the typical colors people think are cold. Cool pinks went into my splatter theme in more than one spot.

I used the neon blue for the background because sometimes people seems to have the background go unnoticed. I wanted to change things up in this aspect and make the most "invasive" color the most prominent one.

Experimentation in Black & White.

In class, our first assignment was to create a piece that involved experimenting with the shape tools and black and white shading. The first step was to get our hands on creating basic shapes like squares, rectangles, circles, and even free-hand work. With mine, I chose to do a combination of quadrilaterals and free hand "splat-like" shapes. Some of the splats and squares represent the negative space, because most of the shading in this piece is of black or grey gradient. 

Within some of the squares, I wanted to gradually reduce the intensity of the shading by making it lighter, kind of like a tunnel. This was a kind of depth of feel.

I also chose to do some of my empty space not completely blank, but more translucent. Kind of like blending with paint, I did the same with my splats and squares.


I know that this can seem a little overwhelming and chaotic, but I think it gives good examples of different transparency, gradient, shading, and shape techniques. 


Comment and enjoy my so far mediocre work!