Ben Bickerstaff

  Dear Ben,   It’s been a long time since writing this. Hopefully now you have found something that you love to do. As of right now, you are stressed. Stressed about all that is to come, and all that could go wrong. Though people tell you that it doesn’t matter and focus on now, it’s a lot easier said than done. But hopefully, it has all gone well. I hope that you have accomplished all you wanted to at this point, and have truly gotten out of your comfort zone. I hope that you have made mistakes. I hope you failed, time and time again, to make you stronger, and smarter than you would have been if you never failed.  Most of all, I hope you are happy. I hope you are happy with your job, family, hobbies and self. I hope that you see the world with bright eyes, and not with a dark cloud, and that you have found some form of peace.   As of now, times are stressful. I am gearing up for my first taste of the real world, and believe me it is nerve racking. I am trying to learn how the world wo

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SlUZaoGO9zU This video shows a beginner guide to the pen tool. Similar to what we did in class last week, this guide instructs on how to use the tool, and create straight lines, as well as curves.  I have been using illustrator for a while, and have used the pen tool a lot. I know that this tool will be very important for our illustrator projects. When I was starting out I remember how frustrating the pen tool was at first, so I am glad that I don't have to fully learn it over again. One thing that this video showed that was new to me was editing shapes created with the direct selection tool. I did not know that once I was finished with a shape I could go back and edit the curves with the direct section tool, I usually do it with the curvature tool. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5jOg2iDPeM This was a very quick tutorial on the basics of Illustrator. Here, they ran through the most used tools, and gave basic demonstrations on how to use them. I w

The assignment was to create a piece of art using html, through Adobe Dreamweaver. When beginning this project, I was not sure where to start, however I decided to make a piece that reminded me of being a kid. The piece I created was from the show Avatar. I created Avatar Aang, with Momo on his head. When figuring out how I wanted it to look, I took inspiration from a Pop-Toy, which I had come across online.   While I love making digital art, I found using html to be very frustrating. In past projects I have worked on using illustrator or photoshop, it is easier to make shapes and manipulate them the way that I want them to look, by clicking and dragging or drawing. With html, I found myself doing, undoing, and guessing for a lot of my design. The project consisted of a lot of trial and error, until I was able to find something I was happy with.   When designing the piece, I wanted to follow the shape of the toy, as best I could. I ran into trouble when trying to create a rounded squar