Lena DeSimone's Blog

 This is the logo that I chose to represent myself, along with my business card. I chose a word that best describes me then went from there creating mood boards to come up with the best idea. 

This project in my Digital Illustration class was to recreate a Garbage Pail Kid cover of ourselves. Historically, these vintage comics would portray some grotesque thing happening to a baby. In my case, I made myself burning over a camp fire with the title "Lit Lena." I sketched this first then I went into each thing in it's own layer playing around with the different brush type to get the ash effect. I drew everything by hand and chose a red gradient as the background.   

This is a project from my Digital Illustration class where we had to do different digitally drawn hands. Each hand is in a different style (top to bottom) painterly (photo realistic), cross hatching, line with hatching, and line drawing. I have never digitally drawn hands before so this project was a good learning experience for me.    

This is another piece from my Digital Illustration class. For this project we were told to remake any horror movie poster so I chose A Nightmare on Elm Street. I took screen grabs from the film and created this composition using different layers. I also chose to use a monochromatic palette with the accent color red to make it look spooky and to really make the colors pop. I had a lot of fun with this project it was a cool thing to do.   

Here is a still life I did in my Digital Illustration class. I used photoshop to digitally paint this still life that I assembled. I am very proud of how this project turned out. I drew each object in it's own layer so that if needed, I could easily move them to change the composition. I started with the objects in the foreground then moved back into the background.   

For this project I chose to see myself as a butterfly. The meaning I chose to show through this piece is to serve as a reminder to myself that I always live as free as a butterfly. I chose a picture of butterflies for the background and lowered the opacity so the image appeared more soft. Then I pasted multiple copies of the same photo of myself then turned down the opacity and placed them in slightly different locations creating a blur affect. I then used the Select and Mask tool to individually mask each butterfly and paste them each into their own layers. After completing all of this I played with the filters in photoshop creating a bunch of cool different images to get several images that are shown above. 

 For the multiplicity project, I used the outside seating area of my building as the background for my production. I then changed into several different outfits so that my final creation had as much variety as possible. I used the Select and Mask Tool for the majority of this project and I had lot of fun with it. It was cool to do something like this because I think it could be really useful in the real world when making projects for clients. 

  This project was extra credit for my class so I chose to put myself into my favorite movie, Clueless. I also used the Select and Mask Tool for this project and had a lot of fun with it. 

  For this project I used a selfie of myself to create three different versions of it that use entirely different palettes for each. In this project my professor challenged us to perfect every edge so that it looked as natural as possible. We also were shown how to create a mask for each part of my face and apply the color after creating the mask with the Select and Mask tool. I'm happy with how each of these selfies turned out. 

 For this project we were given the opportunity to share any message we'd like through our piece. I chose to use the message of "always dancing, never stop" because that is how I chose to live my life. Always finding the positive in every thing that I can and doing a little dance;). For this we had to change the picture we took into black and white then apply a different version using the color options. Before applying the color, this picture had only 6 variations of grayscale. I had to delete each grayscale color where I wanted to add one of the colors represented in my palette.  I also kept the black "noise" that is shown on the lower portion of the piece because I liked the aspect it added to it. 

  For the calligram project I chose a selfie of myself and took inspiration from some of the images my professor showed in his lecture videos. I used the Polygonal tool to create straight lines then adjusted them with the bars on either side of the line. I then used the Type on Path tool to get each sentence to create the lines of my face.