As a painting major at Marywood University, I never expected that I would ever have to touch a computer since my major was all about paint brushes and canvas.
What is really interesting though, is that Marywood requires most of its art majors to be challenged by taking a computer graphics class. While I do love being challenged artistically, taking a graphic design class absolutely terrified me.
Only beginning the third week of school, my class has nearly completed our first project using Adobe Illustrator. When we first began this project, I felt that as an artist my work was much more conservative and I was afraid to challenge myself and set my expectations too high.
Our first assignment was to brainstorm ideas or themes that interest us, and then sketch them on paper using a similar concept and color theme. I chose to theme my project using the eighties because I really loved the patterns and colors from that decade.
The most challenging part of this project for me, was figuring out how to translate my drawings from paper, to computer screen. As an artist who primarily paints, I found it most challenging to use a mouse and think about my work mathematically rather than just use my hand and a pencil and just draw.
I’m very interested to see where this class takes me and if I become more comfortable using a computer as the semester goes on.
