Visual Art Presentation Handout

Le Nabis vs Feminism by Dana Travers

Le Nabis

·         Art movement that started in the 1890’s in France by a (rebellious) group of friends

·         These artists were Post Post-Impressionist avant-garde

·         They used their interests in art and literature to create the art they created

Nabis Landscape By Paul Ranson

Characteristics

·         Art movement that started in the 1890’s in France by a (rebellious) group of friends

·         These artists were Post Post-Impressionist avant-garde

·         They used their interests in art and literature to create the art they created

Feminism

• ·         An art style that communicates the accomplishments and successes of women
• ·         Started in the 1960’s
• ·         Feminists used the idea of “What makes us different than men?” as one of the ideas that was used
• ·         Feminists used examples of men throughout history who dominated women and viewed woman as nothing but mothers of his children. This quickly turned into a Women's Rights movement
• ·         Often use sexuality, Identity, power and human rights to communicate messages

By Barbara Kruger

Stolen Art~In the Music Industry

   We started talking about Artistic Plagiarism in Visual Art. This started to get me thinking about how mad I get when I find out about musicians stealing from other musicians. The huge issue right now involving the music industry is Pop musicians stealing from Metal and Punk musicians. As an artist and a Metal-Head, this makes me mad.

Now, you might disagree and say "But everyone does it! it's just music!" Let me ask you something: If you had a band and you got an artistically talented friend of yours to design an album cover, would you want someone stealing that design for their own use? A close friend of yours designed that for your band. That would have meaning and sentimental value to you. Secondly, it's not "just music". Music is art, and when someone steals a riff, or a lyric for their own personal gain, without crediting the artist, that's plagiarism. That lyric or that riff most likely had a special meaning for whoever wrote the lyric or the riff. To have that stolen by someone without getting credit, is hard to take.

I understand that it's hard to create original music. A series of chords in one song by someone, may be identical to another song by a completely different artist, but it's  99% unintentional. It's unintentional because most musicians know that stealing something from another band or musician is a stupid-head move. It's not nice, and it stirs up controversy.

Examples of Plagiarism in Songwriting:

•  Led Zeppelin was accused of plagiarism in 2014 for Stairway to Heaven. The intro of the song apparently sounds just like the intro Taurus by Spirit. 
•  Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams were accused of plagiarising Blurred Lines after a family realized that it sounded similar to Gaye's Got to Give it Up, which was a huge hit in the 70's.

Examples of Physical plagiarism:

Stealing a band's font, symbol or logo, album cover design or style, are all examples of ways to plagiarize. 

Here is Kanye West's Yeezus font. Look how similar it is to the font Thrash Metal band, Metallica' uses. MetalINjection explains here in this link: Metallica vs Yeezus

Another example is Venom vs Thrasher:

Venom was a Thrash, Black and Speed Metal band from the 70's. Thrasher is a skateboarding brand. Even though the two are two different brands and organizations, their logos share similarities. The Devil head in Venom's logo looks like the goat head in the Thrasher logo. I think Thrasher stole Venom's logo because of all the similarities. Venom has been around way longer than Thrasher. I wouldn't be surprised if I was right about this.

In conclusion, plagiarism of any kind is bad, and it's a criminal offense in some countries. Plagiarism in the Art and Music Industries is sad because someone or a group of people just see something they like and simply take it without crediting the artist. "I'm acknowledging the artist!" How about giving the artist credit and asking for permission, before you steal someone else's work? Musicians and artists work hard for their designs and music. They shouldn't have to worry about someone or some company stealing their work for their own personal gain. It's not a nice thing to do. Musicians do steal from other musicians, and that isn't okay either. People need to be creative and come up with their own designs and ideas.






Other Links:
10-musicians-who-make-their-living-ripping-off-other-musicians.php

The 5 most famous musicians who are thieving bastards 

Kanye West and the Art of Stealing

Culminating poster Reflection

a) The design I used for the poster was a sad, "emo" looking one. I used a plain black background with a white tree to symbolize the dark, sad and angry emotion that is in the music video. This is an effective promotional piece for the band because Let it Die is a popular Three Days Grace song and it will catch the attention of teens who like their music. The poster will also catch people's attention because it has a very deep, emotional feel which will make people wonder "why does this look so sad?" or "I like this. This totally shows the emotion in the song".

b) The symbolism in the music video would be the anger and the love. I recently read an article Click Here! about Adam Gontier (The frontman for TDG at the time) and how he was in rehab for the majority of 2013, (but was dealing with drugs way before then) and while he was in rehab and going through his drug addiction and surviving his "need" to die and commit suicide, he was writing songs. Those songs that are on the One X album are about his drug addiction. For example, Animal I Have Become is about how Adam realized that he needed some serious help with his addiction to OxiContin. Let it Die, is about how he made big, horrible mistakes in his life and how they almost pushed him over the edge. But again, those mistakes are his drug addiction and how it was tearing his family apart.

c) I have around 20 steps. They consisted of picking a black background, and going online to pick a tree image I wanted. Then I put a white filter on the tree and made it transparent. After that, i put a fading gradient on the band to fade them behind the tree. I then downloaded a font that I thought had an edgy feel for the release date. For The Three Days Grace and the One X parts, I found the title image and cropped it in Photoshop.

d) I really liked how the finished result. I do think that I could've added more, but since the deadline was tight, I did what I could. I do, really like it.

9 Music Video Analysis

       
1. Some of the music videos I watched were either, funny, weird, cool, shocking or "controversial". I thought all of the videos I watched were great. It was mostly my first time watching the music videos, but i have listened to the songs before.

2. I considered "Closer" by Nine Inch Nails, and "Heart Shaped Box" by Nirvana works of art because both music videos are considered "controversial"; because in Heart Shaped Box, there's a little girl that wears a Ku Klux Klan outfit, an old man who crucifies himself and unborn fetuses hanging from tree branches. In the Closer music video, there's a monkey on a cross, there are multiple frames of a naked woman, Reznor, (Nine Inch Nails frontman) wearing an S&M mask and leather gloves as he hangs from shackles, and a pig's head spinning on some kind of machine. I classify this as art because art doesn't have a definition. Art has messages and is supposed to make you feel emotions. It's also supposed to make you think about what's going on. Art can be anything.

3. Most of the music videos through the decades that I watched had pretty much the same lighting and picture. I think that's because most of the videos were filmed in the 90's and the 2000's, when the technology wasn't that good.

4. The Arcade Fire video compares to the earlier decades because because it's a modern video but it has some of the quality of the videos from the decades. For example, the lighting was dimmed really dark when the boy was running. That usually shows age in a video, which can also be deceiving. It also compares to the other videos because they band, Arcade Fire has a unique musical style and sound, makes them sound like an Indie Rock group from the decades.

I have included the music videos that i mentioned below:


Nirvana Heart Shaped Box 1993

Nine Inch Nails Closer

Arcade Fire We Used To Wait

Kinetic Typography Video Write-Up

This typography video is called "Ogres are like Onions". The audio is from the first Shrek movie. It is taken from the scene where Shrek and Donkey are going through the sunflower fields to see Lord Farquaad, and Shrek is telling Donkey about how ogres have layers. I made this video in a program called After Effects and edited the audio from Garage Band.
The thing I like about the final product is that I some-what figured out how the program worked. On reflection, I would probably change the program to one that would be easier to use, so that way I could finish it. My design choices were simple. I tried to find the Shrek fonts online, but they had things wrong with them, so I found a font in After Effects instead that looked like the font from the fairytale book from the beginning of the movie. I'm not completely sure what I did to get the final product to be honest, I just did it. But to get what I have, I asked my friend Hannah for alot of help and I also watched alot of tutorials on YouTube for what to do.
The challenges that I had with this video would be trying to understand the way to animate the words and import/export the audio. The solutions that were successful were when i figured out how to get the blue background and figuring out how to make a few words move. (I needed help to get the other ones to move.)

The Video is above. (I apologize for the in completion.)

Digital Self Portrait Painting

For CyberARTS, I had to design a self portrait of myself in photoshop using one of the at styles we covered in class. I chose Colour Field. 

And this is the recreated version on canvas.  The composition is exactly the same because before I painted,  I opened the photoshop document and traced it onto the canvas. 

Comparing the two, I think the canvas looks almost the same. The composition is the same; but the difference wold be the colours. the shades of the pink, light blue, dark blue and green are just a bit different because it was hard to mix the exact colours. Although, I think the dark blue is pretty close. At the beginning of the painting process, I had to paint it in black and white. The only catch was that we weren't allowed to use store-bought black paint. We had to mix our own. Mixing my own black was difficult, because i had to mix the right amount of dark blue and add the right amount of yellow to darken it. That was one of the hardest parts of the assignment. 

The other hardest part was putting the tape down straightly to paint the three stripes. Putting the tape down was hard, but I got it. 

I had a slight problem with the actual image in photoshop, where the image got distorted, and since i traced that image onto the canvas, the painting looks a bit distorted. 

Culminating Poster

In CyberARTS, each of us had to make a poster for an event for our culminating.

My Creation Process: First, I started researching cool ways to make a poster online. After that, I decided to goof around and see what I could do. When I thought about the assignment, the poster was for a digital arts showcase. When I thought "digital", I automatically thought "cameras and computers". My teacher said that we could use pictures from the internet, but we had to edit them, so they didn't look like the original. So after thinking, I took a picture of a camera from Google and put it into Photoshop. After that, I looked through the Filter Gallery and saw the Style folder thing and saw the "Glowing Edges" effect. I clicked on that and the camera instantly went black and the white on the camera had a neon glow-like effect. 

I was then finished with the camera and I opened a new project. After that, I started to work on the background of the poster. I chose blue because it has a soothing feeling to it and it looks good with black. The plain blue looked boring, so i looked for a cool effect to use. I went to the top bar and clicked on "Filters". I saw a "Tile" effect and I clicked on it. It made my background look like tiles :). I liked the tile effect, but I wanted it to look more digital in a way; so I went back to Filters and clicked "Liquify". I then started to liquify the tiles and making the white lines look like an I.V. 

The font is what i worked on after. I used the Poplar Std font. It makes the name of the event and the other important details stand out. 

The computer I also got from Google. I used the "Eraser"  filter to delete the "Apple" symbol. I then also put some "Noise" on the computer to give it that digital look. 

The Gradient on top was the last thing I did. I clicked on the "Gradient" tool on the left side bar and selected the first one. I picked a dark blue and made the gradient. The blue then blended in with the background. 

I feel that the images I chose work with the event and what it's about. They are both digital.