Monday, November 18, 2013

Color Psychology



We learned some really interesting things on color theories and how they affect each and any one of us. No matter how old we are or where we come from, we all have to admit that there are actually some colors that we've seen affect us either emotionally or mentally.
And I guess it's just the same for me. Today the sky had a hazy grey slump to it, but even if I really did love how nice and cool it felt, I could't really escape from the brooding weight I felt on my shoulders; I was feeling pretty glum by the end of the day.

The way that colors affect us lots of different ways is really surprising. In advertisements, people use colors to emphasize moods like excitement and joy by using bright, happy colors to draw people in and buy their things. A example would be with people selling energy bars. They'd use brown and blue a lot to emphasize the chocolate flavored bars, the brown to show that it was healthy and the blue to show the cleansing it would do to your body to keep you healthy.


This place would describe the use of colors in advertisements.




Friday, November 15, 2013

©2013 Copyright. All rights reserved.


      A lot of the times, ideas come out of nowhere. People may be inspired by a certain song and get an idea for a story which in turn evolves into a novel. It might become a best seller and be known as a classic for years to come. If we look closely though, we can see that every 'new' idea is actually an older one that had been reused  over and over and over and over again, just little tweaks made here and there to make them officially 'new'. People have protected their 'new ideas' by using what we know now as copyright, or 'the exclusive legal right to reproduce, publish, sell, and redistribute something.' as said by MerriamWebster. And it sure hasn't ended yet.

    Many people have used fair use to be able to make videos or items without getting in trouble and actually copying the certain media. An example of fair use would be when we use photos from the internet to use as reference for drawings. Even if you use a photo of someone jumping in the air as an idea for a drawing, you're not tracing it so therefore it's not being used for any way to mess up the original image. An important thing that many people miss, though, is that you always have to link back to the original image to let your audience know that the picture itself didn't come from you, but from the  original owner.

   A very sad example of fair use was with the street artist Shepard Fairey who had created the very well known Obama poster. Fairey was sent to court for allegedly using a current photo of Obama instead of the one he had claimed to use in 2006. He was sentenced to a 2 years probation for lying about the image. Fairey had apologized for what he'd done, but he only wanted to let the message of letting people be creative in their own ways to spread.

There are a few websites that help with fair use, all of which having organizations like Creative Commons, an organization set on granting people the permission to share and use your creative work — on conditions of your choice,' and Public Domain,  to back them up. An example for each would be Flickr, a website that has lots and lots of images for people to use without getting in trouble.


Halloween before image used with permission, Creative Commons.

We messed around with Photoshop, exploring what liquify, dodge, burn, and clone can do.

And that's all for now, thanks for reading!