Art Club Layout and Website Critique

mdavis.willyworld.org
In this piece I especially like the idea of creating a clipping mask. All of the objects inside of the clipping mask represent a different form of art or USI. I also like the use of the paint/colored pencil effect used for the background. For the most part the piece comes together wonderfully. I might lighten the blue on top of the USI logo if possible. The white text over the paint effect is a little hard to read in some spots. Like Chuck said, it would be neat if the student pictured was in the Art Club and won an award that the Art Club put money towards.The site itself shows the caption to the picture overlapping the picture. A few minor changes in Dreamweaver could fix that.

andy.willyworld.org
I enjoy the simplicity of this layout. I like the abstract flower effects used as a type of side banner. I am interested in knowing how the flower effects were made. The background design is kind of hard to see, but I enjoy the subtleness of it. The effect used behind just the one letter "U" is kind of distracting to me. It draws my eyes to just the letter "U" but that could quite possibly be a smart move since that is where the text starts.

mtravis.willyworld.org
In this layout I am a big fan of the open notebook idea. I like the fact that the text is easy to read. The hand drawn elements bring a lot to the piece as well. It is somewhat hard to make out the words "Art Club" on the ear of corn. Possibly working with different effects in Photoshop would help bring out the letters a little more. Maybe a different color of paint would help too.

When I was first starting out on this project I knew I wanted to do something cool with paint, but I had never messed around with paint before so I knew it wasn’t going to be easy. I got seven tubes of oil paint, laid them out on a white sketch pad and tried to squirt it out so each would make its own line of paint. I am kind of a perfectionist when it comes to certain things, so you can imagine the time it took just to get the “perfect line” of paint. I’d say I redid them all at least three times. By the third time I didn’t have enough paint in each color to go around, so I took a picture of it and stuck with it. I luckily had enough blue paint left to use as letters to spell out “USI ART CLUB.” Using the paint to create the letters was even more interesting than the lines, but I thought the “not so perfect” look would work. I also took a picture of ears of corn (representing Fall Festival for the Art Club) and different “art tools” such as, a sharpie, charcoal pencil and so on. When picking my objects, I wanted to obviously have them relate to Art Club but I also wanted to be able to represent different forms of art, such as painting, charcoal drawing, graphic design (in putting the elements together through Photoshop) and so on. I know I couldn’t possibly represent all forms of art but I tried to get a variety in there.

When I finally got on the computer and started putting the page together I decided to use a black background so that the different colors of paint would kind of pop off the page. With so much color from the different lines of paint and the lettering I didn’t want to overdo the page so I kept a lot of the rest simple. I also wanted the writing to be easily legible. In the end I decided not to use the ears of corn because I couldn’t find a way to incorporate it into the picture. I used the “art tools” to kind of create a side border for the Art Club information. My three elements ended up being the tubes of paint lines, the Art Club lettering, and the “art tools”.