Huzaaaaah! Final project completed!

This is the final M6 project for the semester. The webpage cover is for a National Historic Monument for the National Park Service located in Rome, New York. Having spent for than 2,000 cumulative hours volunteering at many NPS sites, Fort Stawix is perhaps closest to the heart from my time with the Oneida Indian Nation's Living History Program, although the program was disbanded several years ago.

This project is comprised of 20+ layers and does not include the multiple effects and/or mask layers. Perhaps the hardest part of this project was finding high resolution images that fit within the concept sketch, as many images were not suitable. Therefore, I had to spend significant time looking until I remembered a famous artists, Don Troiani (http://www.dontroiani.com/), who's work from a prior Oneida Indian Nation commissioned project on the "Battle of Oriskany" painting.

I chose to use elliptical tabs in various colors and put a British and Colonial soldiers on them. I also chose to do the same for the Oneida Indian Nation's participation in the American Revolution, siding with the Colonists and using an Oneida Warrior (image of myself). I also included a tab for historic treaties signed at Ft. Stanwix. Additionally, a tab for background detail on each participant's role in the siege of the fort during August 1777. The webpage also represents the form of a map of the fort, where I placed the tabs for each party with the center represented by the treaties tab.

Now I couldn't complete this webpage for the National Park Service without including their seal and adding representations of historic weapons of the 18th century. That being, a charleville flint lock musket, an officer's sabre and a "hawk" that would have been used by the Oneida warriors. Incidentally, could be used as a weapon of war or an implement of peace as one end of the "hawk" is a pipe and the opposite end a tomahawk.

In the background is a British mortar crew firing on the fort and from a bastion of the fort, a 3rd NY artillery crew is returning fire. Now this may mean nothing to you as a reader, but the British crew is a hand painted cast model, whereas the fort's artillery crew are Park Ranger friend's of mine at Valley Forge Historic Park. Each are scaled down to try to give the correct perspective.

An finally, public media buttons to share the site or any information within the site and capped off with my "©2016 Nate George Designs" copyright information.

The final project will be a webpage using Ft. Stanwix (Rome, NY) as the focus during the timeframe of the American Revolution. The unique design of the fort (the four diamond shaped corners) will be locations to click on to see a menu for either the American Colony of NY, the British, the purpose of the fort's location and the contribution of the Iroquois Confederacy (Oneida Nation). Within each menu will be a submenu offering more information about each group.

The idea of the website design is to make the page look like an 18th century map, so for the main page I will try to make it look "old". I hope to find a suitable text script that resembles handwriting of a turkey quill tipped pen and ink used during the time period.

At the center of the page will be an aerial view of the fort that hopefully will show the topography of the land on which the fort was built, as this is the reason the fort was constructed by the British during the French and Indian War and later used by the American Army during the American Revolution. Today, this site is considered a National Historic Monument and is under the care of the National Park Service, the reconstructed fort is not original. However, the location of the fort does sit is on the exact footprint of the original for built in 1758.

Here is my latest attempt using a few more advanced tools in Photoshop. This is my avatar on an Oneida Warrior wearing a brocade black velvet jacket with gold embroidery. "Olite" (meaning "Always returns home") has bear claw applied war paint on his face, traditional practice of cut ear lobes (status symbol), quahog shell ear rings, tattooed face and forehead and maple leaf "sparkles" (the white skin treatment) to his blued avatar skin. His eyes and nose were enlarged, longer eye lashes added

I initially was going to add strawberry leaf detail for texture, but getting this much detail was very time consuming, but it was pretty darned interesting that I didn't even realize I spent my whole Sunday sitting at my desk working on the project! And finally, Olite's background is layered with a woodland forest and Fort Stanwix National Monument (Rome, NY), which was originally built in 1758 during the French and Indian War by the British and was also rebuilt and occupied by the Americans in 1776, during the American Revolution.

I am using a high resolution picture taken of me by a professional photographer from when I involved with an 18th century Living History enactment group for my avatar. I'm thinking of using the color and texture of a strawberry leaf for the skin texture of my avatar. The background for the avatar with either be in a woodland tree setting with white pine trees predominant, similar to the movie, Avatar with the mother tree. An option for another background setting is to use Ft. Stanwix National Monument.

Since I already had this image at hand, it made sense to use the image to jot down possible goals for the transformation of the image into my avatar for the project, vs. sketching from scratch on paper. I'm curious to see where this goes!

Book Jacket V2.0

 

 

Upon the recommendation, I went back in and started to find a way to tone down the original version of my book jacket (the harsh orange and yellow background) and made the book title easier to read (previous version was arched to the radius of the earth and instruments). I actually like the green color better because it is more comforting to the eye than in the original jacket cover.

This is my book jacket design for a group called The World Saxophone Quartet. I first discovered this group when I started listening to NPR radio several years ago and since I have an affinity to the saxophone from high school when I played both in concert and stage band, it was like trying to deny a moth to a flame.

There must be some 22 layers in total and many of them have various edited effects using as many Photoshop tools as I could. Anything from transparency adjustments, changing orientation of images, text, gradient background and 3D text. I could have added more, but the real estate for the book cover was getting thin.

Here is a link to video of the group if your interested in hearing the type of jazz music they play.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccRGordsKec

M4 Sketch A & B: World Saxophone Quartet

I chose to produce a book cover for a favorite saxophone group of mine, as named. I can't make up my mind as to what color scheme to use for the cover, but in my head I hear the music clearly and I keep tapping my foot the upbeat notes in the tune. That could be a good thing for inspiration, but that will be proved in the finished project.

Here is a link to one of their signature pieces of music, in case your are interested. "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TyaPO87woGE"

Upon advice, final edit of my Alternative Energy poster...

I chose the message of the world’s voracious fossil fuel consumption and the resultant pollution and particulates that are crowding our life sustaining environment. There is a finite end to the fossil fuel resources and it is estimated that it is within a window of less than 40 years. Therefore, we need to capitalize on energy alternatives, which are Biomass Energy, Wind Energy, Solar Energy, Geothermal Energy, Hydroelectric Energy sources. What these alternative energy sources do in comparison to any individual fossil fuel energy source is that it is renewable in terms of relative timeframe to fossil fuel sources and the source of the energy is… free! Solar, by far, is the most likely energy source for conversion to electricity or thermal energy (depending on your location to mostly sunny days a year).

I used several well-known images for my poster to exhibit the pollution cause by coal stacks spewing lethal chemicals into the air and traveling significant distances causing environmental effects. I also chose to use an iconic image of Iron Eyes Cody from the early 1970’s environmental advertisements. Instead of using a modern home, I chose to use a 18^th century cabin with photovoltaic (solar) panels, while taking a vibrant sun and diminishing the opacity of the sun and using the coal stacks grey sky background to give the impression of blocking or reducing the sun’s rays from reaching the ground and rendering the solar panel as useless.  There is the step back into time and reverting to a “settler” lifestyle by placing an early 19^th century candid family picture along with a more modern little girl from a third world country that appears to be despondent and of whom I thought expresses the feeling of insecurity in humankind’s insatiable consumption of fossil fuel and resultant pollution to our world. Of course, she’s upset too that there are dead fish in the rising waters that is surrounding the vehicle she is trying to fish from and this also alludes to detrimental implications to our shared environment. To express the anxiety of a heavenly entity, the exhausted angle atop the cabin’s roof mounted solar panel, as if to say not even heaven can save our “Garden of Eden”. Note that the only images that have any color are the solar panel, the sun and the angle while all the other images are in greyscale. For the angle, I chose to increase the white balance to given her more of a heavenly appearance.

Use of Photoshop tools: Since the majority of the images used in this poster are grey scale, I simply used the Image, Adjustment and Black & White tool. Depending on the original color and its transition to grey scale, I may have increased or decreased the opacity so that a layer beneath it would be visible. I also used Image, Image Rotation to get the right placement and then I manipulated the image by skewing it for proper perspective. To help blend images where there were significant transitions from one to the other, I used the Clone Stamp tool. Finally, I freestyled the fishing line by using the Freeform Pen tool and for the text I kept it bone stock by using the Calibri Regular and increased to 150pt font.

References

Aficionados, A. E. (2016, March 11). Alternative Energy Solutions for the 21st Century. Retrieved from Alternative Energy: http://www.altenergy.org/

 Wolfson, R. (2012). Energy, Environment, and Climate 2nd edition. New York City: W. W. Norton & Company.

 

 

 

 

Angle Image: http://tntfamilyhistory.blogspot.com/2013_06_01_archive.html

Iron Eyes Cody Image:  http://dontblinkmusic.org/thesuite/#ironeyes

Dead Fish Image: http://www.kpbs.org/news/2011/sep/14/sewage-spill-raises-questions-about-pump-station-r/

Family Photo Image: http://civilwartalk.com/threads/sad-family-portrait-something-tragically-off.108326/
Text Credit (first line): http://quotesgram.com/quotes-about-green-energy/

Log Cabin Image: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Log_cabin

Young Girl Image: http://justadopt.net/

Sun Image: http://elvenstock.deviantart.com/art/Free-Stock-Image-of-Quarter-Sun-455928413

Flooded Car Image: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flood

Solar Panel Image: http://www.howtomakeasolarpanels.com/diy-solar-panels-solar-panel-save-money-electric-bill/

Fishing Rod Image: http://www.dioramasandcleverthings.com/2012/10/the-wonderful-world-of-gadget-canes.html

Coal Stack Images: https://thenanfang.com/beijing-coal-fired-power-plants-closed-next-year/

M3 Poster Assignment

 

My sketch is focused on the current state of the world and our combined rate of consumption of fossil fuels (oil, natural gas and coal) that has significantly contributed to the otherwise natural and non-toxic CO2 gas in our atmosphere. However, the increase in the concentration of the CO2 gas has caused an issue by forming a "blanket" in our atmosphere and not allowing the solar energy to reflect back into space, as it would otherwise do.

Solar energy is "free" energy and having that knowledge available to us is key because the world's fossil fuel energy resources (known to currently exist) are exponentially be consumed at a rate that can not be replenished. In other words, yes... fossil fuels can and will be replenished... but not within a time frame of one or two generations. Rather, the estimated timeframe is in millions of years and humanity's continued existence is not capable of any lapse or loss of fossil fuel source. And even if we were capable, the global warming and contamination resulting from fossil fuel sources is going to kill us anyway.

That is why I decided depict the social demise of humanity by sketching a draft of a vision of how the world may look with fossil fuel contaminants and how such pollutants are working both against our health, but also against us if we were to substantially use a less volatile fuel source of the sun's energy via use of photovoltaic panels.

Within the sketch I depict pollution, obscurity of the sun's ability to reach earth (due to atmospheric contaminants, aka: smog), a revert back to a lifestyle before fossil fuels became so popular, the inability to grow crops for the lack of sunlight for photosynthesis, deforestation, and perhaps the most unforgivable issue of technology brought us to this crux and now we are stuck with it!

Think something along the line of "Planet of the Apes"... if your having trouble with my rationale for the sketch, but with 10^15 times as much pollution as we have now.

Resources:
Energy, Environment and Climate- R. Wolfson 2nd edition ( 2012) published by W.W. Norton & Co.

"Planet of the Apes"- Pierre Boulle, (1963) published by René Julliard

movie trailer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjcpRHuPjOI

The following are the original images used to assemble my photomontage:

http://archwall.xyz/scotland-house-nature-straw-hd-background/

https://bluesyemre.com/2015/12/30/lemmy-kilmister-motorhead-singer-and-heavy-metal-legend-dead-at-70/e25f9c29bdfb4931b6fc44d8d5ca7b36/

http://alchetron.com/Crossroads-(1986-film)-16980-W

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/LADIES-GIRLS-WOMEN-SHORT-SCOTTISH-TARTAN-DAY-CHECK-KILT-RED-MINI-SKIRT-VALENTINE-/301376476865

https://www.tumblr.com/search/celtic-wolf

The following images are my own:

 

M2 Photomontage- Claymore Blues Clan

 

Ok, here we go! Using a web image as the background, I found a Scottish style home with a suitable landscape. Then I found additional web images of Lemmy (R.I.P), Ralph Macchio and Joe Seneca from the movie "Crossroads" (March 14, 1986) and a random kilt wearing "Valley Girl" as my co-band mates. Using her image, I tried to superimpose my girlfriend's face on to the "valley girl" image only to see if I could do it (not very successful, in my opinion). But the image is rather small that I'm hoping you wouldn't notice, but that little secret is no more!

For the images of the guy sitting on the bench in the background (me), that was from a time not so long ago where I use to be heavily involved in a Living History Program and dressed as an Oneida Warrior during the 18th Century (American Revolution timeframe). The butter churn (which is a small scale model I made that is actually about 5" tall) and finally a copy of my first attempt in making a firkin sized cask (roughly 8 gallons) that was still in the process of adding the lower chime, quarter and bilge rings. I thought of using a cask of some type since what is blues, Gaelic tradition, and white oak casks used to age a single malt scotch? Again, when I was involved with history reenactments and when I also picked up an interest in "coopering", prompted by a good friend of mine named Bob Allers.

Then I consulted with a close friend of mine named Dan Umstead as to potential song titles of my fictitious band, as that is where my writer's block was initially at. Using "claymore" in the band title was also his idea and it had two meanings. #1- the symbol of a Celtic sword and #2- ordinance that we used in the Marine Corps for defensive positions. Blues is self explainatory and Clan because its relevance to Celtic and Iroquois matrilineal ancestral tradition for family lineage.

To be honest, my first attempt was to explore Photoshop and then I discovered that I forgot the image size requirements for download web images. That forced me to delete some of those files and go back to the drawing board to find 600x600 72dpi images. Then I had to go back to the tutorial in Lynda.com to review how to "save for web", but in the end I think I did fairly well in a this work? With exception to further work on making the images fit by using shadowing or gradient layer effects...

M2 photomontage sketch

Simple sketch for first M2 Photomontage. I have a definite blues theme using both images downloaded from the web and one or more of my own. I've also got an idea of trying to "hide" an image or two. As well as to use images that some may recognize, given their movie or music knowledge.

This is my second attempt in using PS. I must give credit for the two images to a long time friend, Dan Umstead for what appears to be the gray scale background. It is the gate mechanism from Fort Stanwix National Monument in Rome, New York. This mechanism was intended to raise and lower the draw bridge to the main entrance of the fort during the French and Indian War, as well as the American Revolution.

The second image is me in 18th century period regalia as an Oneida Warrior (scalp lock and all). This picture was taken by another friend of mine named Elena Walsh. She is a photographer that I met several years ago at Valley Forge, Pa. She frequented the park for her photography interests and she felt that an Oneida Warrior was notable enough to keep coming back nearly every time that our Living History group put on an event at Valley Forge for events sponsored by the National Park Service.

I tried various tools in PS that honestly takes a lot of time to master. So, out of frustration, I simply layered the two pics over the other and reduced the opacity to 75%, leaving the background as it was originally captured. I'll have to more time learning the tools and key board shortcuts to reduce the overall time it took me to get this far...

First attempt with using PS!

This is an inside joke, as I use to be heavily involved in a Living History Program primarily focused on 18th century history (American Revolution). This is a picture of a "6 pound" canon on a field carriage that was layered on a picture of my house serving as the background. The actual canon was fired with black powder (without projectile), but given the amount of smoke and flame on lookers of the event wouldn't notice a difference!

The gentleman in the foreground a great friend of mine ("Brother Pat") and the black powder demonstration took place at Friendship Hill Historic Site for an event sponsored by the National Park Service.

I still need to hone my PS skills, but this is a decent start! "Hu-zzzaaaaaaah!"

Success in setting up Nate799 Blog!!!