Warhol

Andy Warhol

·         Real name is Andrew Warhola (8/6/28-2/22/87) (Became Warhol after a misprint)

o   Born in Pittsburgh, PA, Parents from Czechoslovakia (does not exist anymore)

o   Father worked in a coal mine

·         In High School, kicked out of art club because he was “too good”

·         Graduated from the Carnegie Institute of Technology (Bachelor of Fine Arts)

·         Graduated with degree for pictorial design & wanted to become a commercial illustrator

·         Designed advertisements for women’s shoes

·         Used Polaroid camera

·         Fear of hospitals and doctors, hypochondriac

·         Favorite print making technique was silk screening

·         Friends & family described him as a workaholic

·         His sexuality was speculated upon and how this influenced his relationship to art is “a major subject of scholarship on the artist”

·         First solo expedition in 1952

·         Coined the term “15 minutes of fame”

·         1960s: iconic American products (pop art)

·         Created The Factory, his NYC studio from 1962-1968

·         Celebrity portraits developed into one of the most important aspects of his career

·         Made films (first one called Sleep – 6 hours of a man sleeping) (1963)

·         1965 said he was retiring from painting

o   1972 returned to painting

·         Designed cover for the Rolling Stones’ album Sticky Fingers (cover made out of real jean material)

·         Produced Velvet Underground’s first album

·         Started a magazine called Interview, worked for Glamour Magazine, Vogue

·         Shot by Valerie Solanas 3 times for being abusive and “too controlling” (6/3/68)

o   Solanas authored the S.C.U.M. Manifesto, a separatist feminist document

o   "Before I was shot, I always thought that I was more half-there than all-there – I always suspected that I was watching TV instead of living life. People sometimes say that the way things happen in movies is unreal, but actually it's the way things happen in life that's unreal. The movies make emotions look so strong and real, whereas when things really do happen to you, it's like watching television – you don't feel anything. Right when I was being shot and ever since, I knew that I was watching television. The channels switch, but it's all television."

·         Marilyn Monroe = favorite model (not painted until after death)

·         Wore silver wigs until he dyed his hair silver

·         Practicing Ruthenian Rite Catholic who described himself as a religious person

·         Died of a heart attack brought on by a gall bladder surgery and water intoxication

·         $100,000,000 for one of his paintings (highest amount paid) (“Eight Elvises”)

·         Referred to as the “Prince of Pop”

PhotoShop Reflection

For my PhotoShop assignment, I first used two photos for my main focus. I used the picture of the beach that I took for my landscape shot and I used the picture of two cows that we took for our animal assignment. After choosing those two photos, I tried blending them together. First I made sure the two pictures were exactly the same size and then I went to Image, Apply Image, and blended the too pictures together. At first, the pictures were coming up too light or too dark. So instead of blending the images together, I copy and pasted the cows onto the beach. I used the magnetic lasso tool to outline the two cows and pasted them onto the beach. After placing the two cows onto the beach, I also copy and pasted a picture of spaghetti and meatballs onto the picture. I thought it would be funny to make it look as if the two cows were sharing food (like in the movie, Lady and The Tramp).

After copying and pasting that image, I made it look fish-eyed. By doing that, I made a circle around the spaghetti, went to image, then adjustments, and then finally sphereized the food. It made the food more distorted than it actually was. I also copy and pasted a picture of someone meditating on the beach. With this picture, I changed the color filter of the person meditating. I made the temperature cooler, made the saturation higher and changed the contrast a little. By doing this, I made the person who was meditating look tinted. I also shrunk the person by going to edit, free transform. By doing free transform, the person may become larger, smaller, thinner or wider.

Finally after putting all the pictures in, I wanted to change my background, I added a couple of gradient layers. I did this by making a gradient tool, picked one of the gradients and chose one to put on the bottom left corner. That was my final piece for the PhotoShop piece.

Extra Credit- Blog posts

For this picture, I copy and pasted the image of the restaurant onto my image of the beach. First i found the magic lasso tool to copy the restaurant. After that I pasted the image onto the beach and made sure it fit properly so it looked somewhat realistic. Then I removed the cars in front of the restaurant to make sure it wasn't blocking the front of the building. Finally, I changed the color filter for the restaurant so it matched the beach. 

For this picture, I blended three images together. First, I found three images and made them all the same size. If you don't, the blending process won't work later on. After that, I selected one of the pictures to be a background copy. Then I went to apply image, selected one of the photos, and it blended the image. I changed the type it was so you could see the picture clearer. After I was satisfied with that, I did the same process for the next picture.

For the picture of flowers, all I did was change the filter of these pictures. First, I cropped the image to make it of just flowers, removing everything in the background. Then I changed the photo filter. I made it warmer and changed the color to violet. I did this a couple of times to make the picture seem darker.

For this image i did a threshold on the dog and a color filter for the background. For the threshold, I made 10 different layers of the dog. Then I deleted all the white from each picture and filled in the black spots with different shades of blue. After finishing with the dog, i went back to the background and changed the photo filter.  I made sure the background went with the blue dog (which is why I picked blue and purple for the back)

This picture was for my photo quiz. I did a threshold again and made sure I picked 10 different colors for the dog. After that, I changed the background of the picture to yellow to make it offset to the dog and made it stand out more. Afterwards I fisheyed the dog. I cropped everything out of the picture to make sure only the dog was being focused on,