Final Exam

Tattoo

          For the tattoo, I drew a snake in an old Victorian Era frame.  I used the magic wand tool and the eraser to remove the blank paper from the tattoo background.  Then I rotated the image to fit my arm, and warped it so that it looked like it was actually on my arm rather than an image laying on top of another.  I used the burn and dodge tools to create shadows and highlights to where they were on my arm to make it look more realistic.  If I were to change anything about this project, I would have made the gold part encircle the entire frame, and I would have placed the tattoo on my thigh, because I think it would look better there.

Surrealism

          For the surrealism project, I chose to do something that represented two opposites - the land and the sea.  I also added a girl who's face is detached because it looks like she's in a sort of dream scape, and she represents the harmony between the sea and land (hence why the sky is calm even though the water is raging and the desert is shadowed in darkness).  I used the magnetic lasso tool to crop out the sky from each of the images, which I later replaced with a gradient.  The girls hair looked very photoshopped after I removed the background, so I used the paint tool, burn tool, and smudge tool to fix all the ends and the coloring.  The original image of the desert had 'moving' rocks, so I used the clone stamp tool to get rid of those so the image didn't look odd.  If I were to change anything, I would have dome what I originally planned.  I was originally going to have the part of the mountain on the right and the sea on the left come up to meld into swirling clouds encompassing the sun and the moon respectively, but was unable to do so due to time issues.

cereal box

          As my cereal, I created tumblr o's.  I based them off the entirely annoying blue h*ll site: tumblr.com so I used the exact HTML color code that the website uses as the color of my box.  I also added some tumblr images like the 'artsy; cereal, rainbow slime, and the skateboarder maze.  I also used some textbook tumblr phrases (in comic sans of course) like 'teen angst' and 'do ____ for validation'.  I feel like the best technical aspect of this is how I captured the essence of tumblr with how weird it is.  If I were to do this project again, I would have changed the topic to something that's more aesthetically pleasing to the eyes rather than something that is fundamentally just blue and memes.

paint project

           For the paint project I tried to recreate a picture of Hedwig from Harry Potter.  I think the strongest technical aspect of this is how I blurred the background and got a feathered look on the owl's body.  I found it difficult to make the different hues and shades match the original picture and it seems to not have the same shading.  I feel I did well on the speckles to make each individual one match whatever color was beneath it.  If I were to do something different, I'd have used the burn tool to create more depth where there should be shadows.

Swordicorn

          The hybrid animal I made was a Swordicorn (a swordfish and a unicorn) because they both have sharp protrusions from their faces and it created something beautiful but horrifying.  I layered the swordfish on top of the unicorn and erased everything from the swordfish but its face.  I then softened the edges of the fish head with the smudge tool.  I used the clone stamp tool to bring the blue fish-y texture to the unicorns neck and ears, and to bring the unicorn's hair texture to the top of the swordfish.  To do so, I dropped the opacity down to between 10% and 40%.  From this project, I learned that photoshop is extremely frustrating and textures are overrated, even if the end product looks cool.  If I were to do something different with this project, I would've chosen things with closer color palettes.

Word Project

I chose a picture of a girl on rifle during a DCI show as my image.  Seeing as the night sky is completely black, I wasn't able to use black for my background color so I chose a violet.  I added text of the underlying part of the image and warped it to fit the area.  Then I copied it on the background image and pasted it in place on the text layer.  The flag poles were difficult to do because they are so thin, and only one of them actually resembles a pole.  If I redid this, I would have cropped out the flag in the top left corner.

Identity Project

For the background, I used an image of a pool because I really like how light reflects off of water. In the center there is a color guard flag and rifle because I'm in color guard and my favorite piece of equipment is rifle. The tip of the rifle is in front of the silk and the pole in front of the rifle neck. I cut everything out using either the magnetic lasso tool or the polygonal lasso tool. Below the equipment is the Sherlock logo because it's one of my favorite tv shows. I lowered the opacity on that to make it look nicer. In the bottom right corner is Adele because she is my favorite singer, and in the other corner is Rhiannon McGavin because she is my favorite poet. In the original picture her hair was cropped so I covered it with a leaf crown. In the upper right corner is a watercolor tube because I love painting. Opposite that is the Glossier logo and a bird of paradise flower because I like glossier products and the hotel we stay at when my family goes to California has a whole garden of bird of paradise flowers. I overlaid the lyrics to Glory and Gore by Lorde, because it was the song I used for my color guard solo.

Typography

Typography Using 'M'

I feel that the strongest aspect of my typography project is how I used the warp tool to make the two blue Ms look squished. For the curves, I made a long line of text and compressed it horizontally until it no longer looked like it was composed of Ms, and applied the curve fx and flipped the second one to create an upside down M. The outline of the hearts is created by a lot of Ms at a very small font. I lowered the opacity on some of the layers to create a more interesting look. The green background is created of overlapping flipped Ms as well.

Polaroids

          For my polaroid project, I used 13 polaroid frames to crop a picture of me.  I didn't place any of them similarly so as to make them look scattered onto the background.  I put parts of the background image into the foreground over the photos (the crochet needle, arm, and coffee cup) with the magnetic lasso tool to show depth.  The part I pulled forward was my hair (by removing part of the polaroid frames), so I removed parts of the polaroid frames so it looked like it was over them.  I chose a background that doesn't have a lot of loud colors so that it wouldn't take away from the polaroids.

DVD Cover

          I made this DVD cover of Holes by starting off by creating the half inch margin for the spine.  I wanted to make this more sarcastic so instead of Walt Disney, this is made by "Wait Gisney", and is entitled "Holes - aka that one movie about that one guy with that really weird name."  I created the review/summary on the back to be satirical as well "Stanley Yelnats has a history of bad luck in his family.  He gets sent to a juvenile delinquent camp in the middle of nowhere to dig holes.  There he meets Hector Zeroni and they run away, eat some onions, and find Stanleys long lost treasure.  In the end, his family makes shoes stink less."  I faded the scene of Stanley and Zero so that it looked less rigid and created a background for the front cover.