Poster essay

The posters were a very fun project. I chose to do a movie and propaganda poster. Both challenged me in different ways, and I learned different things about using Photoshop to get them completed.  The expected challenge is why I chose the poster themes I did. I almost did a third poster using the final theme as well.

IT, also known as “Interesting Times” is a movie. In the process of creating this poster I learned more about the “text “tool and how it works. Using the vertical type tool, I found I had to type my words in backwards. This means I had type “Times Interesting” in order to get the words to appear as I desired. Using the text tool I also explored the choice of text color for this poster. Creating this poster also taught me about more way to manipulate color and photos. I used one of my own photos from this past spring. There are four different copies of the photo. I changed the sizes on two of the copies and added two hue and sat layers between the photo layers. I altered the opacity on a couple of the layers.

JOBS the second poster I experimented a great deal with color and opacity. The background is at about 50% opacity in both versions that I posted. I also used the shape tool to create this poster. My brother has taken a few copies of this poster to give them a real life trial at his school. He plans to post them in a lab where he works and observe and report to me on how people respond to them. This poster is actually the one I completed first I overheard a cement about “job” being an acronym and decided to take it a step further. It took me most of the week to figure out how to do this one and then to get it so I was happy with the results.

One final note, as a result of writing this essay I learned something new about our use of Language. “An acronym” two words not one. When spoken it sounds like a single word, though when written it is two words. So art projects have the ability to cause you to learn things from other subjects including English, Math and Science.

poster samples

Portrait Soup Essay

In some ways this was an easy assignment and in others it was difficult. I found it easy to photograph things in nature, but difficult to photograph people. Getting a self-portrait also was a small problem, though I was ultimately successful and have posted two.

Handling my camera has always been a small challenge in some ways for me. This project has encouraged me to push my camera further and to push my abilities in using it successfully. The self-portrait caused me to review using the timer function. The portrait of the dog required some work on position while using the camera. As usual, when I take my camera out, I take hundreds of pictures and find it to be a challenge to shrink the number down to fit an assignment. In this case I took over 400 pictures over the week and had to then shrink the number down to fit and then I found myself with about 30 pictures. I worked with these and still posted about 15 to 20 of them. To help me do this I used “Bridge” to help me with previewing all of the pictures. This helped me to shrink down the number of pictures though I still found myself wanting to post all that I could.

In Alphabet Soup, I used Photoshop on all but four of the pictures. In these pictures I typically used curves, hue and sat and the black and white layer tools. The picture that looks like a “N” makes the most extreme use of the curves tool. This one has small flowers at the points of the N which is a lowercase letter in cursive handwriting.

In Portraits, I used the curves tool on all posted pictures. On one I also used the crop tool, because I felt the photo worked better. I find that I do very well taking portraits of animals; however taking portraits of people is not so easy. I am not comfortable asking people if I can take pictures of them, even when I know them. When I do not know a person it is even harder for me to do. Critters do not get upset when you take pictures of them, nor do you need to ask permission to take their picture.

I do recognize that some of my pictures in Alphabet Soup could have been used in Portraits however I preferred them where I posted them. This was a very fun exercise and I really enjoyed taking the pictures for it. I even enjoyed the time consuming part of paring down the number of pictures to fit the assignment.

Portraits

Alphabet soup

 

 

Type essay...

This was an interesting project. I really enjoyed it. The project caused me to become a bit inventive, especially when I decided to use the Chinese characters are my Chinese Pug’s name.

I experimented with several fonts in all of my projects. Some of the fonts I liked and some I did not like. There did not seem to be any difference in tails or no tails to the fonts I liked and used. My choice of font was based on how I perceived that the selected letter looked in various fonts.

Some of my letters are random (I asked my cat to choose) and some were deliberately chosen for personal connections. The letters “F”, "A" and “H” were chosen at random (with the cat’s help). I own a small sheep ranch and the other letters are the initials from its name. The Chinese characters are from my dog’s name.

I rasterized five of the letters after copying them, on the one included with this essay. These copies were then adjusted with the brush tool, using a couple different tips.

I enjoyed working with this project. It caused me to think and consider choices and why I thought one font was better than another for each letter. Please enjoy all of my posted work. I did several others that I have chosen not to post.

Text samples

 

 

 
These are some of the project results from this assignment. I added the final one because I thought it was interesting and that people might enjoy seeing the original spelling of my dog's name. It is in Chinese characters. 

Wa Dou, a dog's name



Toy Essay

I really enjoyed the toy project. I found this to be a lot of fun. There are several ideas I played with while doing this. I liked the idea of using a picture of my puppy to create a couple of my posted toy ideas. I used the colors of the puppy’s face to create the majority of the toy, and used his eye to create the toy’ face.

Leaning about the hue and sat tools helped with color selection and alterations to color for the project. For a couple of my toy ideas, I just used other projects ideas for the back ground of the toy and then changed the face to match the idea I had for the toy.

The Hue and Sat tools also helped with the toy that I used my dog’s picture for. In this case I also used the eyedropper to choose colors. Most of the toy I used the fill tool to create. For the face however I used the picture of the dog and cut out his eye. I resized and duplicated and flipped and then matched the pieces together.

Some of my toys started as an idea and others did not. I am not sure I would create a story for my toys, though I would not complain if someone else wanted to use them as inspiration to write stories about.

A few Toy Ideas

These are several toy ideas in visual format.  The essay will be posted later.  There may also be a couple more toy ideas posted with the essay.

A few more Scratch pieces

These scratch pieces are the result of further playing with the tools available in Photoshop.  They were quite fun to create and I like them.

The one to left was done first and the one below was done second.

This lower one was also practice in playing with the hue and saturation tools.  I found thatIi really like to mess around with color, and that this gave me another tool to use when doing so.

scratch 3

This one is a big learning lesson.  There are several reasons for this.  One I bought a tablet to use for the class and to help me decide if I want to purchase the ultimate professional tablet. Two I have the cs4 version of the Photoshop software on my laptop.  Finally it took some time to get the two to work together.  I am still in the learning process and hope to get better with time.