Calligram


            This project was a calligram, or an image made out of text. The text was a letter to my future self. Or rather, it started as a letter and devolved into an opportunity to wax poetic about positive and negative liberty. As the theme throughout the letter was of liberty and freedoms, I went for the imagery of an arm grasping a flag. I used Adobe Illustrator to create the calligram, primarily employing the "Type on Path" and "Envelope Distort" tools. It cumulatively took about 4 to 5 hours to create. While there are some problems, I am pleased with how this project came out.


Reference Image:




Letter to the Future (Text Used in the Calligram):

Dear Sage of the future,

I hope this letter finds you at a time where fascism is not breathing down the necks of effectively everywhere on Earth but realistically that will not be for a long time. There are many things which I hope for you. I hope for you to embrace a love for humanity and community. I hope for you to allow yourself to be vulnerable. I hope for you to stand by your principles of equity, solidarity, and liberation. I hope for you to finally feel comfortable in your body and to actively fight for others to have that right. For universal liberation and fulfillment are the rights of the world. Liberty and freedom will always be the fundamental goal. Freedom to love. Freedom to live. Freedom to thrive. Freedom to embrace the tragic beauty of the human condition. Freedom to accept the absurd. These “freedoms to” necessarily require “freedom from”. Freedom from poverty. Freedom from fascists. Freedom from homophobia. Freedom from transphobia. Freedom from the boot of capitalists. Freedom from alienation. Freedom from patriarchy. Freedom from racism, both interpersonal and systemic. True liberation can never be achieved without the unification of freedom to and freedom from. I hope you continue to understand this. Or, ideally, understand this better than I do. Hopefully, you learn how to get out of the ivory tower and actually organize to bring about this liberation. ­For what are ideals without action? All the philosophy in the world is only meaningful in that it either causes or inspires action. Action and organization translate ideas and the abstract into the material, the tangible. While both the abstract mental construction and material are real to some extent, neither are anything without the other. Ideas are nothing without manifestation and manifestations are nothing without the ideas which imbue them with meaning.

Whatever happens, never forget this.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Introductions

Image
Howdy, I am Sage Boutelle and I am a film and media arts major at the University of Tampa. I am from Tampa so, as you can imagine, I did not have to go very far. I am a lover of pretentious cinema so if anyone wants to hear about niche French films I can provide that. Once, I was qualified for and planning to go to a national competition for high school journalists and filmmakers but that was back in March 2020 and the funniest thing happened.  This class looks like it is going to provide for an interesting semester. At first glance, the assignments for the course look like they will be challenging but in an engaging way. Through this course, I hope to become more familiar with the Adobe software suite, especially Photoshop and Illustrator as my experiences with them thus far have not been pleasant. I am looking forward to working with and learning from Professor Roundtree and hope that this will be an excellent semester. That is all, Sage Boutelle  
Read more

Photoshop Homework 2

Image
go to  https://www.instagram.com/kirbyjenner/?hl=en ; find 1 image you think it would be really hard to photoshop yourself in to, post the image and the comment on your blog  I think this image would be really hard to photoshop myself in because of its complexity. There is motion blur, multiple lighting sources, and special streaks of light which I would have to account for. 2.  go to  https://www.instagram.com/averagerob/ ;  find 1 image that inspired you or gave you an idea for the "Somewhere" project. Post the image and the comment on your blog This image inspires me for the "Somewhere" project. That is because it takes the same idea of taking some image and photoshopping yourself into it to involve yourself in the story of the picture. 3. go to  https://www.boredpanda.com/funny-photoshop-troll-james-fridman/  find 1 set of images that made you laugh, post them on your blog with your comment  This made me chuckle as it both technically followed...
Read more

Photoshop Tool Tutorial Overview

Image
 Photoshop Tool Tutorial Overview How to Use the Lasso Tool to Cut Out Images In Photoshop           This video covers the lasso tool and its variants. All seem very intuitive as effectively only requires outlining an image. Although they are not always precise on the first go, it looks fairly easy to go back and make adjustments. It is very useful to mask out specific parts of an image. All forms of the tool has its own strengths and weaknesses, so the real challenge is knowing how to work around that and select the appropriate tool.  Making the Object Selection Tool Way More Precise!           This tutorial covers how to effectively use the object selection tool in photoshop. Using it requires just selecting a whole object using the tool and photoshop should get most of the way there in outlining it. You could then use the object selection tool to add or subtract to the selection by holding shift or alt, respectivel...
Read more