Yep… I just finished my finals for the Digital Image Manipulation II class I took last session. In fact, I finished the Wednesday and started my new class (Art History: Prehistoric to the Early Modern Era). I had a lot of fun with the Digital Image Manipulation class. It has actually been a while since I took a class that allowed for the use of Photoshop as I have had a lot of illustration classes in the past several terms. I was feeling a little rusty with the tools and how to/what to use them for in the first week or two of classes but after I felt I had the hang of it again I was very excited about all of the new things I learned.
He will probably not be very happy with me about sharing this with you but I was really excited to learn a bit about touching up photos and this is a picture of my son that I did for an assignment dealing with that. Sorry kid, but teenagers just naturally provide the perfect opportunity to practice doing photo touch-ups.
Oh! I also learned how to create animated gifs in Photoshop! This one is a little rough/choppy but I am really happy with how it turned out despite that because this was my first attempt at it.
If you follow my blog you most likely already know how my classes work but just in case I will give a brief refresher. Each of my classes is 6 weeks long. We cram what would be in a regular 12 week class into six weeks with enough reading and research to make your eyes cross and three major assignments per week. The first two of those are exercises in which we demonstrate what he are learning in lectures and our text books that week and the last is part of an ongoing project. This ongoing project is always the final for our class (or a major portion of it). Every week we post a step of that assignment that displays how we have applied what we learned to our project.
For this class we had to choose a quote and create a poster illustration the quote through compiling digitally manipulated images. For my project I chose the quote “Comparison is the thief of joy”, Theodore Roosevelt said this and I just love it. I first heard it a couple of months ago and it really resonated with me because I think that artists are all guilty of comparing their work to that of other artists and devaluing what they do in the process.
To illustrate this quote I decided that I wanted to go with a “grass is always greener” approach. Because I always prefer to use my own art and photographs I forced my sweet nieces to pose for pictures that I could use in this project when we went on our 4th of July camping trip. When I got home I picked some of the pretty flower out of my garden and photographed a bouquet of them as well. The only image that wasn’t my own was the one of the grass I used, which I got from ThinkStock through my school library.
Here are the images I used in their original forms.
After many, many revisions this is what my final ended up looking like. The only thing that I am unhappy with is the way that the grass came out. If I had more time/inclination I would o back and flip the front layer of grass so that the pattern wouldn’t repeat itself in the front and back layers. As it stands, I have so many layer and clipping masks going, I just don’t want to sort through all of them to make that change now. I will fix it later before I have this professionally printed for my portfolio.
It looks like I will be doing A LOT of writing in this art history class so I am in hopes that I can make more time for art as I will be starved for it (not that I don’t love and view writing as art.. this sort of writing just isn’t particularly fulfilling). As soon as I get my homework done today I am going finish up work for a trade I am doing right now involving cabinet cards and super heroes. I will post about it as soon as I am done (I am having so much fun with this one!).
