CHRIS

Audio of my work

In this first task we took a look at an article that explained how eating choclate was better for the brain.

Here’s one for chocoholics to chew on. After consuming drinks enriched with compounds found in cocoa beans for three months, the performance of people aged 50 to 69 on a memory test was akin to someone several decades younger. Problem is, if you want such a benefit from eating chocolate, you would have to eat staggering amounts.

The small study is the latest to suggest that chemicals in cocoa called flavanols can have beneficial effects on the brain. Flavanols are a type of chemical found naturally in cocoa beans, blueberries, green tea and red wine. Previous studies have suggested that mice on a flavanol-rich diet showed enhanced memory and greater blood flow to certain areas of the brain. Scott Small, a neurologist at Columbia University in New York City, wanted to see what affect a similar regime might have on the human brain.

To find out, his team instructed 19 volunteers aged 50 to 69 to drink 900 milligrams a day of powdered cocoa flavanols mixed with water or milk. This dosage was spread over two drinks each day. Another 18 people had to drink a similar beverage that contained just 10 milligrams of the compounds.

Before and after the three months, people in both groups underwent fMRI scans. Comparing the scans revealed that after the regime, the high-dose flavanol drinkers had about 20 per cent more blood flowing to a particular section of their hippocampi, called the dentate gyrus, than they did before. The high-dose drinkers also had about this much more blood flow to the dentate gyrus than the low-flavanol group. Intriguingly, this region has been linked to age-related memory decline in people.

Now you see it

In addition, each person had to complete a memory test before and after the three-months. In each test, participants were shown 41 similar, abstract shapes, one after the other. Once these had all been presented, they were shown 82 more shapes and had to identify the ones they had seen before. Previous work by Small’s team has shown that from their twenties onwards, adults’ reaction times to identifying previously seen shapes decrease with age, by about 220 milliseconds for each decade of age.

On average, the high-flavanol group reacted to each shape 630 milliseconds faster than the low-dose group. This is equivalent to the high-dose group performing as though they were three decades younger than the low-dose group.

But don’t start stocking up on Mars bars just yet, cautions Small. “Yes, these flavanols exist in chocolate, but in a very miniscule amount,” he says. “You would have to consume so much chocolate to get it that you would damage your health.”

Public health issue

“Society is ageing, and we are always looking for interventions to delay the decline in cognition that goes with this,” says neurologist Madhav Thambisetty at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland. “This study tackles what is a fundamental public health problem.”

He says he would like to see what affect drinking flavanols has on other types of memory test in a larger study – which is what Small plans to do next.

Sebastian Jessberger at the University of Zurich in Switzerland agrees that more work is needed to tease out what the flavanols are doing. For example, he points out that it would be good to find out how long the effect on memory lasts, how much is needed to be effective, and if the compounds are causing changes in other parts of the body.

“It’s naive to think that you take a drug or a compound and there’s only one area where something is changing,” says Jessberger.

My illustration for the article

i came up with this illustration but i feel like more could have been done to represent the article.Annotation of article for keywords.

Mind maps and ideas

Artist research/inspiration – Analysis of their work. Does the approach help communicate, or is it the actual content/symbols used?

Tests and experiments

Outcome

Evaluation: how you solved 2D problem – problem is – article with very boring image – image does not give any hint at what the article is really about. Illustration should entice reader to read the article.

Drones

Another artyicle we looked at was about drones and their pros and cons and we had to create an image that represented it.

Quick Draft Ideas

Final Outcome

This final outcome was very minimal due to the fact that i had run out of time and became more of a rough draft compared to what i had in mind but i believe despite the fact it has not much in it, it still represents the idea the article was trying to put out, the idea of which was the fact that alot of people would not like droneas flying around their home and the drone being shot over a farm supports this.

space geckos

The article talks about geckos that were sent into space along with some other animals. The geckos were said to have been playing wit hone of their collars that had come off. We were tasked with making an image that could represent this article.

I spoke about this section of work in an audio file which i will add soon.

Rough drafts for my outcome.

i used chalk to give a childish style to keep with the focus of how the geckos had been recorded playing on the ship.

• How does your approach and use of materials help communicate your idea?

• Do the symbols/metaphors you have used in your image convey the correct intention? Could they be misunderstood?

• What tone of voice does your illustration have?

• How could you improve your communication in this outcome?

Book cover

The book was about a group of kids in a school on venus as they waited for the sun to show for an hour for the first time in seven years which was the primary theme of the story.

This work was also spoken about in the audio recording which will be added in.

research of book covers

Feldman analysis

The Hobbit

Description

This copy was printed in 1937. It uses five colours which are red, green, blue, white and black. It is in a 2D format. It includes imagery of forests, mountains, river, sky and birds. The subject matter is landscape and is in a portrait format.

Analysis

The foreground has trees and a river. The mid-ground includes mountains. The background is the sky and birds. The formal elements in this book cover are sharp definite lines to create different shapes such as the mountains have definite peaks, it’s more patterned and focused as it doesn’t blend together or have smooth lines and in a way has formal lines except for the trees that are more informal. The colour is put into blocks and has no gradient for example the trees and grass are one shade of green and the mountains have white on their peaks to show their height as it signifies snow. The clouds are blue with a more lined pattern rather than smudged bubbles.

The leading lines are focused on the river at the centre of the page that leads into the mountain and up to the title of the book. The majority of the colours are cold however the contrast is caused by the red sun which is a warm colour. The use of patterns and lines around the river at the bottom of the page help break up the image. Because the image is 2D there is not a lot of space and little perspective. It looks as though it has been made with lino print. The image seems very influenced by an old eastern style.

Interpretation

There is not much relationship between the title and the book cover especially to people who don’t know the story of the book. The mountains are most notable due to the fact that they seem more prominent and cover most of the page. The least notable part of the image is the sun as it is at the very top and there are no leading lines there and the sun is partially covered as well. The cover suggests that the story is about adventure into mountains and valleys, i get the feeling that the story is also an old fantasy style because of the runes around the boarder of the cover. The images seems very inspired by old eastern art or tapestry.

I like the cover as it is simple and it represents the style of the story and i like the use of block colours and keeps the image simple and not too detailed and defined and i like it because it doesn’t reveal too much about the story so it makes you think. There isn’t any obvious negatives that i can find in the cover. I think the artist was successful in creating a productive piece of art as the style has been reused in later times as inspiration and influence for other books by J.R.R. Tolkien and books made by others relating to the story he created.

• Notes and ideas from reading story

The Story is dark and gloomy.

Development of my final outcome

Book cover for All Summer In A Day by Ray Bradbury.

Using the line tool i made a bunker style building to represent the school the children were in. I used the paint brush tool for the background. i used dark colours to represent the dark theme of the book.

I used an extra layer of black colour to darken the overall image.

I added a layer of rain effect to the image because the theme of the book was how it only stops raining for one hour every 7 years.

I then added a sun creeping through the clouds to represent the story of the book as it talks about the time the sun came out on Venus.

• Outcome with text

• Evaluation: how you solved 2D problem – problem is – introduce Ray Bradbury to teenagers, get them reading more.

Animation tests

Screenshots, annotation, GIFS and evaluation from:

High-dive – problem = acceleration

Keyframe – problem = motion and poses

Rotoscope – problem = capturing motion

The speed of an animation within frames depends on the distance the image travels. the shorter the distance the slower it is, the longer the distance the faster it is. The website we used is simple to use and understand but is very limited.

Rotoscope

In this project we were given a dance sequence recorded by the dance students and we took it into photoshop and edited it to make it look different like adding colour or effects to it.

We then put our rotoscope together with others work aswell and combined them in priemier to make one video.