I won a contest and was interviewed on the radio

    My college decided to do a Giving Tuesday contest. To win people had to use the hashtag #CDIiskind and post pictures of themselves doing nice things for homeless people and society. I gave money to a homeless person and bought coffee and food for another. I also picked up litter from the ground outside and threw it away in the trash can. 

    I ended up winning on Twitter! There were two rewards to choose from but in my heart and mind I had already decided that donating was the best prize. I just wanted to give back to Canada and to Winnipeg so I chose a charity and asked CDI College to donate the funds there. CDI College loved my choice and decided to donate a thousand dollars to my charity, which is the downtown Salvation Army, Centre of Hope shelter.

    Word got around of my generosity and of the college's great contest reward. 680 CJOB decided to ask me if they could interview me about it and I accepted. I was very nervous but the phone interview was quick and painless. Over the phone radio interviews are actually pretty cool and fun. They connect my voice to what's going on at the radio station and then broadcast everything on the air. I really enjoyed this experience. I thank God and my college and Canada. Their really are angels in the (radio) airwaves.

    To listen to the short interview please click this sentence and once on the website click on "Jenna Bourgoing Donated..."

Click on the Jenna Bourgoing title

My interview was saved here too

Click to see my Twitter page

The charity I donated to

The door to the SA shelter

To donate please see above info

Tools to make Pixel Art

    Who knew pixel art was so easy and tough to make? I learned a lot while researching this project though. Adobe.com has some great tips on how to start your pixel art piece with Photoshop and Illustrator. There's a lot of Youtube videos that explain all this with more expressiveness. This Video explains how to lay out your pixel grid. And Megavoxels.com has this great tutorial to read and this one too that explains how to export your finished art. Finally, as a helpful guide Pixel-Stitch, this and Lunapic can show you what a finished pixel art may look like once it's all filled in.

    I don't know if I'll ever have to make pixel art for my clients in the future but at least there's a lot of resources out there to help me start.

Update!: I decided to buckle down and actually try to pixel an image square by pixel square in Adobe Illustrator and it came out well. Thank God! It took hours but now I can say I can make pixel art. I chose to pixelate a Blythe Doll character.

Making Digital Color Palettes

    Yesterday's assignment was fun and simple. I went to a popular mall and walked around taking photos with my iPhone of colorful objects. The furniture store had a lot of cool displays but they preferred neutral, earthy colors over bright, additive colors. Maybe in the spring or summer their colors will be more vibrant and bold. I still got some great captures though! It was fun sampling the colors with the color picker tool and then filling in the squares and organizing them in my palette. Very designer-ish 😉💛

Click on the pictures to enlarge them and then you can read at the bottom, the brief descriptions of my assessment of the color combinations used in the images.

The Gestalt Principles in Design

    Gestaltism was founded in the early 20th century by a group of psychologists. The Gestalt Principles describes how humans group similar objects, recognize patterns, and simplify complex images. These principles are divided up into five categories: proximity, similarity, continuity, connectedness, and closure. Artists and Designers of all types use it to organize content and make it appealing. It's also great for building logos.

    For this topic's assignment I had to take an object and simplify it. Breaking it down to abstract lines and shapes. This project was fun and stimulating! I will definitely use this method in the future to make logos and banners in business cards and websites.

    I stuck with my ladderback chair image and deconstructed it:

The Final image illustration of the Chair Story

    Design Assignment 1, Personality Personification of a man-made object. My story is about "The cycle of life from the perspective of a chair." This is the scene I chose to illustrate in greater detail: The senior couple living happily together in their home, watching TV still utilizing the man's childhood chairs that his father made. 3 artworks. 2 digital collages.

The rough draft

Storyboarding, The Story of a Chair

    Design Assignment 1, Personality Personification of a man-made object. I chose to draw a chair. The cycle of life from the perspective of a chair. The storyboard has 20 thumbnails. 5 strips.

    I wanted to create a cute love story. And this is what materialized.

Here's a quick summary of the story beginning with the first row: The chair is being made in a workshop by a man who then brings it home to another chair.

Second row: The chairs like each other. The man's family consist of a young child who grows into a man.

Row three and four: The son who is now a man, falls in love with a woman. They sit and live their lives by utilizing the chairs who are also in love with one another. Time goes by and the adults become senior citizens, then the old lady passes away. The lady's chair eventually breaks too and is used as fodder for a fire. The other chair is sad, and daydreams about past memories.

Final row: Eventually the old man passes away and relatives drive the furniture, possessions, and chair to a consignment store that sells furniture. The old man's chair is surrounded by new chairs and furniture. Eventually someone buys the chair and it is recycled to a new home. Life continues.

The last drawing page is a detailed rough draft that highlights moments that could be in the story.

Click on picture to enlarge it

2nd Website Project utilizing Dreamweaver

     Learning how to use Dreamweaver was a little bit of a challenge for me but in the process I ended up memorizing some valuable CSS codes. I am now comfortable making separate <div classes and using advanced HTML5 and CSS codes when building websites. I was gently pushed by my teacher to pick a website online and to try to replicate it. I chose to try and replicate a WIX musician portfolio website that has a split screen. A friend of mine is a shy musician but he agreed to let me use his images and videos as content for the site. I tailored the website theme to meet his emo style. The website is made as a fake musician portfolio for him, highlighting his guitar playing skills and his music taste etc.

     I found the split screen layout code on the W3Schools website. It worked but with some glitches that my teacher, friends, and I had to tweak. I spent a few days changing words and numbers in the code till I learned what was what and what did what. It was a great learning experience! I wish Myspace.com was still around so I could build cool Myspace layouts all day LOL. 

    For the INSPIRATION section I vectorized my friend's selfie profile picture and added headphones and put it next to his Spotify playlist. He loved it! The CONTACT page has a cool text effect in it if you click the picture there. The BOOKING section that lists his fake booking agents was made entirely in Dreamweaver. I learned, at the end of my project after putting it online that the code I used worked well on desktops and laptop computers but not as smoothly on mobile phones. I did my best to try and solve this dilemma but I wasn't able to fix everything. If you would like to see the website message, comment, or email me. The class project was directed at laptops and desktop computers and so I got an A mark. In my previous blog entry about building a comic book page flipping website, the code that was used for it is mobile friendly. It's just another lesson learned for me. I have grown a lot taking these courses and I know that I'll just keep getting better and better at coding websites. You have to remember that I didn't use an easy website builder with widgets like WIX or SQUARESPACE. I built everything from scratch using only HTML and CSS. The Dreamweaver textbook taught me how to easily tweak things and add useful elements but I also had to Google a lot of the solutions myself. I am happy that I know now the basics of building websites. It will be interesting to see if Dreamweaver evolves to implement widgets in it's website building strategy in the future.

Using Dreamweaver to build the BOOKING page