Oleg Tumasov is the master artist and owner of Tumasov Fine Art Studio & Gallery on El Camino Real. He has been working with fine art since he was a pre-teen and has travelled to many different places before settling down in the Silicon Valley to start the art studio business. He was raised in the Soviet Union and was always surrounded by an art community due to his father.His father then inspired him to become a master artist too. He adores having people come into the studio to look at his antique items from different countries, sign up for his art classes, or even just watch him create his own work of art.The studio has a very welcoming and lively atmosphere so he is more than happy for people to stop by.

The profile unit, or also known as our documentary project, was one of the most dedicated things I had to work on at Freestyle. This project took a couple of months to complete due to the ammount of visits I had to make with Oleg Tumasov. My focus of this unit was to create a profile for Oleg and his studio to show what an interesting person he is. I chose to do my project on him since I have known him for a while now and wanted to get to know him better through this process. Plus he deserves the attention to be brought onto him because he is indeed a one of a kind person. This was a completely new experience for me and I learned a lot from this unit. It forced me to go interact with the real world and I had a job to do for each class in Freestyle! For English, we brainstormed questions for our needed interviews to then write out our recorded transcripts. We did some secondary research and pieced this together into an article. For Design, I went out and took pictures to practice photography skills for this focus and then designed a magazine for the article I wrote in English. In my Web Audio class, we recorded our interviews on a voice recorder device, made a commercial to advertise our star, and finally created a profile website for them. All these projects can be seen below this. Use the buttons to navigate to each piece of work.

 

For the commercial of this unit, I had to write out a summary of why people should be interested in Oleg Tumasov and how he stands out from other artists. I recorded my commercial script on my voice recorder device before putting that recording into ProTools to clean the quality of it for the listener to then hear it properly. I then used After Effects CC to make the final product of this assignment. I imported appropriate photos and images to match up to the script reading. I used tools such as easing, opacity levels, audio levels, blur effects, and so many more to make this commercial look more professional and enjoyable to watch. I was limited on one minute to introduce and advertise our star so this was a bit of a challenge. It was a learning experience though. Below the commercial clip you will see an interface of the After Effects CC set up as I was working on this project.

During the process of creating this magazine for Mr. Tumasov, my documentary unit's star, I used InDesign to design and put together this work. In Freestyle's English class, I wrote out an article focusing on Oleg Tumasov's life by gathering details given from interviews with him and two of his students. I made sure to spend a lot of quality time with him in his studio to really get to see what his style and personality is like. That gave me a plentiful list of ideas of what elements I can use for the magazine to make it really reflect on what type of person Oleg Tumasov truly is. The first thing that was very important for this assignment was to choose out a color palette that will give off a mood of the topic. As I stayed my couple of hours at the studio, I observed Tumasov's color choice for his studio and artwork to see what he would usually go with. Since he had a trend of combining Thai, Egyptian, and Armenian culture together into one art piece, I wanted to go with the color paletter of a redish brown, golden yellow, and a dark blue. While creating this magazine's layout, I decided to use a repetitive graphic element of a dark blue, crocodile scaled paint splatter on every page so it ties everything together in a pleasant manner. To place the images into the magazine nicely, I used a drop shadow and even cropped some to fit the page in a good position.

This magazine might not follow the traditional magazine set up, but it definitely reflects on who Oleg is as a person. He is a very outgoing and inspiring person since he expresses himself so freely with confidence and handles so much at the same time. So, to reflect these characteristics, I designed the magazine to look a bit busy yet enjoyable to the viewer. When placing in a photo, I learned that adding a drop shadow or even a glow to it can make it really stand out even if it is such a small design feature added. Another thing that was a neat tool to give the design of the magazine some flow was the feather tool. I took the tool and dragged it across the selected image to make is opacity fade out. Also, one really important tool I struggled with but learned a lot from is the text wrap tool. It was important to place an image with a good crop into the magazine InDesign file because when doing a text wrap around it, it could have a weird line arrangement around it. If I was having a problem with that, I took that image into Photoshop to crop away extra space and trim out the transparent pixels in it. When I would put that image back into InDesign, the text would neatly wrap around it. I then adjusted how many pixels around the border of the image I wanted the words spaced away or closer to it. Lastly, something that I always needed to remind myself to do was check for errors in the file or else the magazine would not be able to print. These errors were usually text boxes being filled up too much, so I had to go back and delete the extra words taking up the text box’s space.

Here is my InDesign interface.

Idecided to record these three people because I believed they would provide the best information for me. Aside from using Oleg Tumasov for the first and follow up interview, I also used a former and current art student of Oleg’s to get some different viewpoints on him. I met up with Arian Beyer, the former student, at the San Antonio Center so we could discuss his experience at the studio and what he learned from Tumasov. Altana Normaeva, the current student, is still in the process of learning about art from Oleg and still has a lot to practice before reaching a professional experience with it. Though, she does provide good feedback on his relationship with his students. Click on each person's name below to listen the interview I had with them!