Malak Krayem (FMX 210)

  I did not think creating this image would be as fun as it was. At the start, I was very intimidated by this project thinking it was going to be super difficult. I thought I would have to precisely outline every bit of the images, but when I watched the tutorial I was so relieved that photoshop was a lot smarter than I gave it credit. Some areas were more difficult to smoothen out than others. The biggest challenge for me was making sure that every character still had her shadow. That was a little complicated but after an hour or two of zooming in and fixing all the little details, I'm quite pleased with the result. To make this more interesting for myself, I created a bit of a narrative between the different versions of myself to allow them to interact with each other rather than every person doing their own thing. While some of them aren't involved in this scheme to disrupt someone's nap by drawing on their face, I think there is a nice balance of action going on. The in...

  This project was quite odd. I had a lot of fun with it as I felt like there were no restraints. At first I was a little hesitant about making myself look ridiculously bad, but as I got to my second version, I actually found it kinda funny. You can see the progression of the colors of my skin tone getting crazier as I began to let loose. I was pretty impressed with the preciseness of outlining my hair. I think this was a super valuable exercise for me to get the hang of the lasso tool on Photoshop! Original photo:

                When looking at all the projects from previous students, I noticed a lot of them had a strong message. I instantly decided I wanted mine to have one as well. The best way I could go about this was to make it personal -- make it something I could relate to. And so I decided to speak up on the conflict with Palestine. I thought, who better to shed light on such a devastating issue than an Arab?  I made several versions for a few reasons. First, I thought I was only going to focus on Palestine. So in the last version of my poster, you see the Palestinian flag at the bottom. But when I decided on the text I would overlay on top which says "when do we begin supporting each other?" I took into consideration the importance of all the countries involved in this problem.  The best part about directing this message to all Arab countries, both those who claim to be standing with Palestine and those who aren't, is that most of o...

  Lo and behold, my most tedious project yet. This project took me days and days to complete and perfect to a point of satisfaction. I realized I created a more difficult challenge for myself once I picked a picture where my head is tilted sideways. This would mean that the words wouldn't fall down in the same direction of my face. So when I first started, I considered changing my image after seeing this first trial: But then I realized it looked kinda cool, and I committed to it. And I'm so glad I did. I think the final product turned out better than I had anticipated. And honestly, I could see myself doing this again with a different image.  I was hoping to create this project in all Arabic at first, but I quickly learned that Illustrator does not properly support Arabic alphabet, which would have made this project near impossible to create as I had to type my words into a different program that reshaped my words in order for me to paste it into Illustrator so it could look ...

I had a lot of fun creating my own logo for this project. This is primarily because I was given permission to use my native language, Arabic, to create it. Even as someone who grew up seeing it all around me, I have always been in awe of Arabic calligraphy. I never was able to write it myself as it requires years of skill and experience. This made discovering the calligraphy tool on illustrator so much more exciting for me than you could possibly imagine! It felt so good to create my own letters and make them look beautiful. The meaning is what I'm most proud of. Essentially, the logo you see says the word "Arab" and "Malak" at the same time. I used the letter B from Arab and rotated it sideways to create the L from my name, Malak. The M from my name is what creates the dot that goes underneath the B. And to top it all off, I put a halo to reflect the definition of my name: angel! I got inspiration from a lot of Arabic logos I found online. I knew when I was doi...

  Moving from Canvas to Illustrator was a pleasant surprise! After hours of staring at code, it was a relief to be able to use actual tools that did the math for me. In order to practice using the program, I decided to trace an image of Stitch to create my own drawing of him. If I do say so myself, it's kind of impressive! To see why I said that, take a look at the original image: Almost impossible to tell the difference, am I right?

Canvas was quite challenging to work with, but I was able to have a lot more fun with it than I thought. I knew from the start that I didn't just want to just create one image, but rather two separate objects that sort of interacted with each other. So I chose a UFO because I thought it would be interesting to trace, and Timmy Turner because he's one of my favorite cartoon characters! This way it would seem as if Timmy were being abducted. This is what it looked like as I began tracing:  The interactive portion was the most difficult. It took me so long to figure out how to make it move but remain in a certain area without diverting into the rest of the image. But the outcome was so worth it! And here it is: