Reflective journal by Thomas Fanta

thomasfanta1999 — 2018-03-07 19:14:33 UTC

Reflective journal 1 collection

1. How did I get to this decision?

I’ve decided to go with the main theme of different types of electric plugs, so I drew some of them on paper the size of an actual plug of my classroom, to show the diversity, I drew using a pencil and was going to countour with black ink.

2. How did I get to this decision?

After some criticism I’ve decided to change my style of refresenting the electric plugs and instead of doing pencil and ink, I went for a more simple and colorful style, with colored pens, and I colored each plug with a different color to represent the diversity.

thomasfanta1999 — 2018-03-08 22:22:45 UTC

Class 08/04/18

Today we tested two new printing methods with our collection theme, for me it was electric plugs, so for one I made a fairy simple drawing, for the second I made more of a simbolic drawing.

Typography

thomasfanta1999 — 2018-03-12 00:11:29 UTC

Serif- the end of a stroke found in letters
Sans serif- same as serif but with less width to it
Ligature- the joining of two letters into one single glyph
X-heights- distance between the base and tops of the lower case letters
Cap-height- same as above but for upper cases
Bowl- curved part of a letter
Ascender- the part that extends upwards in a Lower case letter
Leading- the distance between the baselines of letters
Kerning- the space between two letters
Picas- unit of measure that’s equivalent to 1/8 inch
Points- unit of measure used to measure fonts, 1/72 of an inch
Em dash- width of the “m” lowercase ( em dash =\= hyphen)

12/4

thomasfanta1999 — 2018-03-12 18:58:06 UTC

Today we looked for the alphabet around everyday stuff
It wasn’t easy, but with some creativity I managed to get all my photos
The best way to get something is being creative (sometimes) and today I had to use this saying a lot
Looking around and trying to relate objects and forms to letters were not so simple for me
I think most of my photos went went, also the second part of our assignment went well
The second part we were assigned to develop 3 different styles to a letter given to us randomly, also the letter had to relate to our photo, I was received the letter “I”, at first I couldn’t figure a way to create something different, but after some brainstorming I managed.

20/4

thomasfanta1999 — 2018-03-20 18:39:55 UTC

Today I worked on a protest sign, the theme was chosen yerstaday, I went on a more complex theme
Using the word belief and enlightenment, I made with a yellow paper and black ink, I wrote the text
"Belief is the path to the light”
I wanted it to have double meaning, it could be taken on a more religious theme, or motivational theme.
The calligraphy part was the hardest on the work, but I managed fine, I added a white effect around each word, to add more to the light theme.

Before I decided to make this project, I wanted to involve more of a electrical part to my work, using the word enlightenment as a bridge to connect both meanings. But I quickly discovered that I couldn’t bring the message I wanted to it, so I scraped it and went on making the project described above.

23/4

thomasfanta1999 — 2018-03-24 02:52:26 UTC

It’s finnaly day to present our work to everyone! This weeks been hard but my work is complete to present, I put my poster into a medium size tree branch and walked around as my form of protest agains the limitation of choice.
The morning period was basically performances and people finishing their works, myself included.
After lunch we all went around with our teachers and tutors and saw everyone’s works, we then were assigned to write notes on at least 3 works, with all of them being constructive.
When we finished this assignment One teacher separated everyone in pairs, and each pair had to thoroughly explain his work, after listening, we each wrote a bigger note to one another, trying to put to letters what we discussed about our works.

26/3

thomasfanta1999 — 2018-03-26 22:45:17 UTC

In today’s class we had to show the photos we gathered through 2 weeks to groups of 6.
And during this we discussed about them with each other about our choices and preferences.
After lunch, we had a talk with Cézar and Monique about photo filters and some famous artists.
Even Cézar got to talk about his history as a artist and photographer, explaining his creative process and feeling through his career.
In the end it was time for us to do work, and we began to brainstorm some ideas for filters and contraptions, we have a mission to create some kind of item to put on our photo machine or phone and have our own filter set to the front of the lens.

28/3

thomasfanta1999 — 2018-03-29 10:46:27 UTC

In today’s class we had an assignment using our 25 photos we’ve found, with them we were asked to use them to create different compositions. The first was about adding something to the pictures with markers or paint, I’ve went with a more comic approach and thought it worked well!

The second one was about reducing the image, cutting spaces and trying to not change the meaning, but the composition, I choose a car photo and cutter the image in half, I then switched orders to make the back of the car be on the front and vice versa.

For the third composition, we had to stitch the photo, maybe adding another photo to it, or filling spaces with string, my approach was to stitch another image to a background, ive decided to use some people exiting a room and putting them in a park, it worked well since the dimensions of both images matched pretty well!

The fourth one was about cutting, we had to cut the photos and change the design someway. I decides to use a photo of the sea with a couple of boats and a mountain in the backgrounds, I removed the sky and the boats from the image, but that made the mountain look like the sky, and that’s not what I wanted, I then started to cross-hatch the mountains, to add a sense of profundity and not some bland space, I thought that even the task being about cutting, it didn’t meant that I had to fully remove a part of the photo, so I went with this approach, and it worked nicely.

The final project was a free idea one, were we could come up with how to work with the photos, as long as we used the previous used techniques. I chose to use a lot of different techniques, I choose a swamp as main photo, but I wanted a misty effect so I removed the sky and changed to a more cloudy one from another photo, I then drew a crocodile in the water to change the pacific atmosphere to a more scary one. For the finishing touch I went through the whole image with a gray brush very lightly, to add more effect to the mist.

This project today was fairly simple, but each one had its difficulties and required individual thinking, and I enjoyed to experiment with so many different techniques, it was also a nice approach to photography for me, as I’m not so interested in the subject.

3/4

thomasfanta1999 — 2018-04-03 13:58:32 UTC

today we had our progress tutorial, mine was with Daniel.
the purpouse of this is to point out what im missing from works, assigments, etc.
Daniel told me that im missing research and some days on the padlet, and that my A3 sketchbook is very limited and that I should explore more techniques and put more information on it.
I aknwolegde all he said, I knew beforehand thst this was going to be said, but I wanted to hear from him, as a sorta of a wake-up call.
Now I have limited time to do as much as I can to counter these problems, I belive I can do it.
But there were nice comments, he liked how im into drawing characters and action scenes, im beggining to explone more and more of this type of drawing(comic). And he liked my works, but said that I should take more care about the finishing, to try to have a more sharp finish and not looking too messy.

9/4

thomasfanta1999 — 2018-04-10 18:55:40 UTC

Today we began to work in class our new project, make our own publication, could be anything.
We began the class with a quick assignment, 30 drawing in 30 minutes, one drawing in a minute, all of them should be about our ideias for the project.
After that, I’m groups of 4, we evaluated our ideias and tryied to develop new ideias.
After that we began to sketch our ideias, building the format and getting information.

After lunch we had two presentations, one for Jaygo and another from Leopoldo.
Jaygo explained his works process, how he viewed art and his journey. He then also explained his course and showed some of his students works. He explored more of the world of illustration, making designs for companies and projects.
Leopoldo presentation was right after, he explained how he worked on the world of typography, he showed his works and also explained his work process, he explained how it’s important to be aware of jobs in companies and how that benefits you immensely. He also showed a big project of his that was a game and book about typography for kids, he received a lot of praise and got support from the government, this led to him teaching for 2 month in public schools about typography.

10/4

thomasfanta1999 — 2018-04-17 21:40:36 UTC

We started the day by having a presentation with our tutor, were going to have this all week and it’s very insightful, this time it was sol turn.
She showed all her work and process, also told us her strategies to rise in the market and what benefited her .
It was nice but what she was talking wasn’t going to be my area so I didn’t made too many notes, wish I had.
After lunch we had some time to work on our project, but quickly we were called to have Kevin explain his works and talk about his BA class at Ebac. Everything.he told us he already did at the start of our classes, but he called some of his students that either are still in class, our are working. They explained their works and how Kevin helped them, also showed their process, but in a more simplified way.

11/4

thomasfanta1999 — 2018-04-17 21:51:25 UTC

In today’s class we began by separating our group in twos, one was going to Mac lab and the other was going to stay in class, my group went to the lab, there we had a tutor teach us some basics on how to use photoshop by giving some photos and showing some ways to enhance or change them, it was insightful but rushed, witch lead me to not being able to improve são much my skills.
After lunch we switched classes so we stayed in class, there we were able to work on our publications, but also tell the class ou main ideias, it was a good time since we had some help from our tutors..

12/4

thomasfanta1999 — 2018-04-17 21:57:31 UTC

Today the process was the same as yesterday, we separated in two groups, mine went to the printing room, the other stayed in class, in the printing room Marcelo explained and showed us how the process of marking the canvas worked, he explained this to me in my ebac preparation classes before I entered the school, but it was a nice reminder.

After lunch we stayed in class, and had a discussion similar to yesterday, but now the tutors would try to help or add for the students works, it took a long time to have my turn since I was the last one, but it was cool to hear everyone’s stories, mine took the longest due to some misunderstandings.

13/4

thomasfanta1999 — 2018-04-17 22:00:40 UTC

Today we basically had the entire day to work in our publication, Leopoldo offered some tutoring for the class, but I passed since it wasn’t going to help me.

So I decided to work on my storyboard and expanding my universe.
But we did had a travel group come in and give us information for our trip in September, it was insightful and comical.

17/4

thomasfanta1999 — 2018-04-19 20:19:25 UTC

I missed class because I had a fever, so I used the rest of my time to work on my drawings, I did page 4-8, very productive.

18/4

thomasfanta1999 — 2018-04-19 20:19:42 UTC

At the morning I worked on the last page of my comic, it was frustanting, but I managed.
We had a talk with Michael and Daniel about copyright, it was informative, but I was aware already about the information, but it was a good reminder.
After school, I started to edit my drawings with photoshop, Bia helped me, I edited quality, file and added textbox to it, since it was my first time using this program, it was hard, but I did it!

19/4

thomasfanta1999 — 2018-04-19 20:19:53 UTC

I went to a print store to print out my final project, I was going to lose the introduction, but I felt it was necessary to go before it got busy.
The rest of the day I was pretty much free to finish everything else.

16/4

thomasfanta1999 — 2018-04-19 20:20:21 UTC

Today the day was given to work on the project, I had a couple pages of the original done already, so I managed to make a couple more in class, I also did more research and began to work on my research file, since the deadline was next week!

20/4

thomasfanta1999 — 2018-04-20 17:40:22 UTC

Today I helped the class to clean and organize the room were the event was going to happen, took a while but it all worked well.
After lunch we had a crit in duos, my critique is that I did well in the idea department, and that my message was clear and it targeted a certain audience well, I also used a good amount of techniques to complete my work, pen and pencil drawing, coloring with markers, editing on photoshop, folding techniques to make the booklet and lastly I learned how to trim paper using the digital guillotine with Monique’s help. In the other side, I should’ve taken more care to pay attention to details, it’s ok to have some flaws, but it adds up negatively in my work, another thing is the writing, it wasn’t too natural, the pacing was odd and it has some grammatical errors, and that on a comic is unacceptable.
But overall, in the side of looks and design of product, it looked good. Also I did research and it showed, I had plenty of different ideias and plans on how and which project would suit me more, I showed on my sketchbook various attempts of creating the story and characters.