When it comes to school as a whole, I’m double majoring in studio art/astrophysics. People think these fields have nothing in common, but they’re pretty similar to me. They’re both very visual things, which is why they appeal to me. I’m not yet sure what I want to do after college though, because there’s a lot of different ways to combine these two things and it’s hard to pick. I’d enjoy working in the graphics department for NASA, which is perhaps the most obvious thing, but I also like the idea of operating telescopes, especially ones that observe beyond the visible spectrum of light. The concept of taking pictures in wavelengths we can’t see and then rendering them so we can understand them is amazing.

As for the D Center, my favorite thing to do at work is helping people with digital art programs! I love learning new programs for digital art and figuring out all the little things you can do in them, so getting to show other people all the cool things I’ve found is super fun! My current favorite programs are Photoshop for photo manipulation and Krita for digital drawing and painting, but I also enjoy Adobe Illustrator, and a handful of other things besides. I don’t know everything about these programs, but if there’s something I need to learn how to do I’m good at figuring it out. Finally puzzling out a tricky image operation and getting it to work for me is one of the most satisfying feelings ever.

so, here’s what I’ve been doing lately.Our final project of the year in Digital Processes is a one minute long video made in final cut pro. I’m not sure this clip is going to be in my finished video, but it helped me figure out how to create an animation in Adobe Flash and integrate it into FinalCut along with video shot from my camera. I’ve never really done animation before (you can probably tell), but I like the aesthetic I have going here so I’ll probably try more of it.

I know I said earlier that I’d get better about naming my layers, but I still forget to do it about half the time. Anyway, here’s some screencaps of one of the times I did remember. With thumbnails enabled, it’s still easy for me to tell what’s going on in each layer without looking at the names, but the names definitely come in handy if I want to disable the thumbnails to have a more compact view of my layers. Changing how thumbnails appear in the layers toolbar can be done by right clicking on the darker gray area below the layer.

I’ve never had the time to figure out the brush engine in Photoshop until now, and after messing around for a while I’ve decided I’m ok with it. I do still prefer Krita for this kind of thing, but now I can at least modify photoshop brushes in ways relating to pen pressure, and change the brush angle. If you want to mess around with brushes yourself, you can find the settings in the brush window (Window>Brush). If you browse through the sidebar, various aspects of the brush can be set to respond to pen pressure by clicking on the “Control” drop down menu below the feature you want, and selecting “Pen Pressure”. Provided you have the right kind of tablet, you can now do all sorts of wacky stuff. Even if you don’t have a tablet which responds to pen pressure, there are still a lot of fun settings in the brush window. I suggest just messing around with them for a while and seeing what they do!

Here’s an example of what I mean. This is actually better than I usually do, since I have one layer named. It used to be a group of three layers, which I had named R, G, and B, because they had similar content and I was having a hard time telling them apart from the thumbnail.

Until next time! If I manage to do a better job naming layers, I’ll show you guys what that looks like.