Gulliver's Travels Illustration

As a group, we decided on Sarah Willis' book club idea Gulliver's Travels. This satire reflected many great ideas of romanticism, including the ability to question the powers that be and to explore the natural world around us, which Lemuel Gulliver does in his many adventures. Since the most famous of Gulliver's scenes is when he is among the small people, I chose to illustrate a different "travel" of dear Gulliver.

Gulliver Speaking with his Houyhnhnms Master.

Click for larger version. Created with Photoshop.

In part four, Gulliver arrives in the land of the Houyhnhnms and the Yahoos. The Houyhnhnms are the masters and they resemble horses. The yahoos, who are humanlike, are the very dumb slaves to the Houyhnhnms. Gulliver is discovered and well liked by a Houyhnhnm, who becomes his master. He learns their language and begins to teach his master of England and of the affairs between different countries where he comes from. This is a scene of Gulliver explaining to the Houyhnhnm the politics of his hometown. I imagined his master to be quite wealthy and to have Yahoos servants adoring him at all times. This is not specifically described, but I felt it was a bit of artistic license I would like to take.

Creating Art on Photoshop: A Basic Tutorial

So, for this post I am going to show the basics of how to create and post digital art on an art blog, using my Gulliver's Travels illustration. First of all, you'll probably want to use a fancy thing called a tablet. It's a kind of plasticky pad you draw on with a stylus like a pad of paper. The points on the pad correlate to pixels, so its like you are drawing straight onto the screen. A must have for any digital artist. It can connect via USB ports to the computer. Here's mine a Wacom Intuos 3:

These can get pricey, so if you don't have one, go take your ID card to the media lab in the basement of the HFAC (provided you are a BYU student, of of course), and you can try one out for a few hours. For this tutorial I am using Adobe Photoshop CS4, but any of the recent photoshop versions will be great, this is a pretty simple tutorial.

Nominated Blogs!

Throughout this Digital Civilization class that I have been blogging for, there has been many entries among my classmates. Some of them have stood out to me, and I have nominated a few entries for their awesome content and connection. And the Nominee's are.....

Self Evaluation: The Sequel

         Seeing as this is an experimental class with experimental expectations, I feel like my posts have been more meaningful this time around. Meeting with Dr. Zappala really helped me to direct my learning. His big three pieces of advice were that I should (1) use more historical data and that I should (2) incorporate illustrations into my blog and (3) use diigo more often to document my self-directed learning. 

As far as Historical Content goes, I have a few rules when it comes to learning something new from a class. I am a firm believer that I should be able to find something exciting or interesting in every topic. (Yes, that even means economics =) ). With that mindset, I have truly been able to see some cool sides to math and to the complex systems of our world. I have posted various blog entries where I try and think things out and I try to see things from my own angle. See the Alan Turing post for an example of this kind of historical post.