Designing a Logo

It was fun to design different sketches of logos using my initials and sketches of things that interest me.  I just started drawing different designs with my initials and symbols that relate to cars that I like or things that I like to do.  I discovered that designing a logo is harder than I thought, trying to make it all balance and in shape.  I learned the 5 principles of effective logo design from this website:

http://justcreativedesign.com/2008/01/08/how-to-design-a-logo/

The videos show that the process to designing a logo is very time consuming, from the brainstorming ideas, sketching design, proofing, getting approval from the customer and processing the finished product.

Final Logo created with Acrylic paints

Value Scale and Color Wheel works of Art

I was actually looking forward to doing both of these projects.  I have never been into art but now it seems more fun.  I enjoyed the acrylic paints more that the pencils.  I felt like I was the guy in the video, dabbing the paint, mixing the colors.  It was interesting.  I discovered that if you have the right tools and time you can create nice works of art.  I liked the videos they were short and to the point with a lot of good information. 

Color Wheel

Value Scale

Photobucket - Slideshow - Elements and Principles

This was actually a very interesting project.  Before I took the pictures I found myself looking at things differently, thinking of what category it would fit into for the slideshow.  Here's a link to the slideshow, hope you enjoy.

http://s1190.photobucket.com/albums/z442/dobswj47/

Color Theory and Emotional Effects

Color the most powerful artistic element but the most difficult to control.  Color works on the human brain and body in powerful ways.  Color is function of light.  Colors effects on emotions – how appetizing would green mashed potatoes be – you wouldn’t know what you were eating, disorienting color cues.  

Color properties – hue, value, intensity

                Hue- name
                Value – lightness or darkness
                Intensity – relative purity of color

Primary colors – red, yellow and blue:  These colors cannot be made by mixing other colors. 

Secondary colors – orange, green and violet: These colors can be made by combining 2 primary colors
Intermediate colors – products of 1 primary and 1 secondary color.

Red – increase appetite, horror, blood, anguish

Blue – lowers blood pressure, pulse, respiration rate, calming effect, freedom, calming (oceans, sky)

Bubble-gum pink is relaxing. 

Red and Green means Christmas

In the Color video the part most interesting was those painters had contracts and were told how much of each color they could use for the painting because of the cost of each color. 

In the Feelings video the most interesting part was about Leonardo da Vinci   - Mona Lisa painting.  Painted in 1505 he captured a person, a smile a human.

Aesthetics - Week One

Aesthetics: Philosophy of the Arts - Key Concepts

1.        Study of beauty and art – works of arts

      2.       Plato – 4^th century BC – what is beautiful in itself is not this object or that one, but which conveys their own nature.
      3.       Aristotle analysis tragedies – Unity of action, time and play.
      4.       Francis Hutcheson – 18^th century – The ideas brought about in our soul by beauty and harmony delight us necessarily and immediately just like the other sensible ideas.
      5.       Alexander Baumgarten – 18^th century coined word aesthetics from Greek words for perception, aisthanomai.
      6.       Immanuel Kant – Through the genius nature set rules to art.
      7.       Friedrich Von Schiller 18^th century – When we develop our aesthetic capacities, we develop our moral capacities, so much so that aesthetic education renders moral education superfluous.
      8.       Geary William Heyei – 19^th century – The work of art is a sensible object not only for the sensible intuition, but also for the spirit… The beautiful is defined as the appearance or the sensible reflection of the Idea, of the Absolute.
      9.       Geburt der Tragodie –
    10.   Friedrich Nietzache – 19^th century – Only art can replace old mythologies.
    11.   Ludwig Wittgenstein – 20^th century – Do you think I have a theory? Do you think I am saying what this is and what that is? I describe; I give examples. You have to describe ways of living in order to be clear about the aesthetic principles.
   12.    Morris Weitz – 20^th century – What I am arguing, then, is that the very expansive, adventurous character of art, its ever-present changes and novel creations, makes it logically impossible to ensure any set of defining properties.
   13.   Art is art no matter what we call art, even an upside down urinal
   14.   John Dewey – 20^th century – Feelings aroused by a work of art are not purely a personal experience, they must be of a universal nature.
   15.   A work of art is no longer unique and unrepeatable with the digital era

Carta: Neurobiology Neurology and Art and Aesthetics      Accent makes it difficult to understand

    1.        Jean-Pierre Changeux – rules and constraints of artistic creation: the neurobiologist viewpoint.
         ·         Works of art = artifacts, human productions… specialized for intersubjective communication that use – symbolic forms – genetically & epigenetically encoded
         ·         Distinct from language = non verbal communication of emotional states, knowledge, experience with multiplicity of codes yet, under implicit constraints of – rules – regies de art
         ·         With esthetic efficacy staggering effects on emotion & reason mobilizing conscious & non-conscious processes
         ·         Art is constant evolution = art history renewal yet without apparent progress
         ·         Novelty – constant search for the unanticipated
         ·         Consensus partium – the universal search for harmony
         ·         Symmetry vs. aesthetics – within the brain
         ·         The artist attempt to share his conception of the world
         ·         Schematization; - bottom up realism vs top down abstraction?

2.       Vilayanur Ramachandran - The science of Art: A Neurological Theory of artistic experience

         ·         Science and Art met in our brains
         ·         How does the heart respond to art
         ·         Eight laws of Art
                        Grouping or binding
                        Peak shift principal
                        Contrast
                        Isolating a single cue to optimally excite cortical visual areas (attention)
                        Perceptual problem solving
                        Symmetry
                        Abhorrence of unique vantage points and suspicious coincidences
                        Art as metaphor
  
Wow it’s a lion – when your brain figure out what the picture is

Immanuel Kant theory on aesthetics was judgment of the beautiful is subjective. No exact science of the beautiful. Kant proposes that aesthetic experience brings sensibility and reason together. Judging beauty is a feeling and cannot be formalized. His era was the end of the 18th century Enlightenment.

The videos continue teaching about aesthetics of art and explored more how the brain works when looking at art.

I did not enjoy the French speaker Changeux he was very hard to understand, but Ramachandran was very funny and a good speaker who keep my interest.