Personal Expression

Okay, so here's my personal expression! I guess I should write about the "techniques" that I used. First, I used the 5 different fonts, the maximum you can use, that I felt matched all the different traits I put in this picture. I have a radial background gradient to the major parts of my background. The blue side shows that I can be calm and serious when I need to be, but the orange corner expresses my randomness and energy. The blue part also has fading rounded rectangles that are arranged in a pattern to show that I can be honest and rigid and routine; the orange part has a bunch of circles and triangles thrown around everywhere to show that I can be random, and the diagonal lines represent motion, or energy. For the blue part, I used mainly horizontal and vertical text to represent stability, formality, and alertness. As you move towards the center orange part, the words begin to become slanted and curved; a used the "Text on a Path" tool a lot to curve the words around my picture and the gradient. I also used that tool to make the word "inquiring" look like a question mark. I experimented with some of the stuff to make the words the color they are. They started out red, but then I went to the transparency panel and changed the thing for all the words to "overlay" and left the opacity at 100%. I thought it looked cool how the color changes with the background color, so I left them like that.  I think that's about it... oh, and make sure you look for the special square about chocolate!  

Television (Personal 3D Creation)

Here's my personal 3D creation. This was actually pretty difficult because I didn't know how to use some of the tools, and some of their steps were confusing. I think it looks pretty good. They said you could use any symbol you wanted to use for the screen, so I just made an "S" with a face... not sure why, but I just did. Anyway, enjoy!

Vase

Here's the vase we had to do. It was fairly simple; the only annoying thing was trying to use the "Map Art" thing to get the flower on it. On the tutorial, their vase only had 5 surfaces, but mine has 22 for some reason; I couldn't make the flower very big because otherwise it would get cut off. Other then that, it was pretty easy. I added another copy of the flower and used the 3D settings to make it look 3D. I also used the pen tool to make a stem and made that 3D using the "3D Extrude and Bevel" effect. Hope you enjoy!

Flowers!

Here's my flower thing. It was pretty easy, I just followed the directions on the website. Anyway, I hope you enjoy it!

Snowboarder Guy Picture

Here's the snowboarding picture thing that I guess was used for the Olympics or something. I just followed the directions; most of it's the same as the original except for the swooshes and the font (I had to use brushes to make the font look special since I didn't have the font they used). The only other difference is the snowboarder in the background. I couldn't find the picture they used, so I just found my own and then used the Live Trace tool and got rid of the background. Anyway, enjoy!

Meiji Bar!

I decided to recreate this delicious Japanese chocolate bar (one of my favorite kinds of chocolate!) for my picture recreation. As you can see, the one on the top is mine, and the one on the bottom is the photo I used. I used the pen tool for much of the picture, such as the line designs, the little tear drop looking things in the corners, and for the word "Meiji." I decided to use the pen tool for the word "Meiji" because there was no font that matched the word. I used the text tool for the word "Milk Chocolate" because the BrushScript font was also a cursive font that seemed to match the word "Milk Chocolate" close enough. I replaced the Japanese writing on the yellow sticker on the right with "It's Delicious!" because I thought it was fitting... and I didn't want to try to recreate the Japanese characters because the picture was so blurry. The only challenges I had would be trying to get the right curves using the pen tool, but other than that, I didn't have too many challenges. Anyway, I hope you enjoy this as much as I enjoy Meiji chocolate!