A Funny Little Project

This silly little guy was a project that I have been working on in my Digital Image Manipulation class. Our final assignment was to create a “silly character” for a fictitious entertainment company to use in marketing toys, games, and videos. We had to choose from several characters and then construct our version of the character in Photoshop using photographs of everyday objects.
The idea from a design standpoint was of course to follow and stick with the clients specifications for the project and to plan a successful design that held up to your original proposal through weekly editing and changes. On the technical side our image was to be clean, organized, and the objects put together in a realistic way.
Obviously, I chose “Flippin’ Food Fred” here… I thought that a character like this would be great in teaching children about nutrition and healthy eating in a fun way. My goal was to make this a friendly creature that might be memorable/easily recognizable to the target audience. Although I kind of feel like this was a pretty goofy project, I do think that I successfully did what I set out to do. I learned a LOT in this class and am far more comfortable with Photoshop now. I look forward to using my newly acquired skills in upcoming projects (I have a box of photos that I have been meaning to get to work on and I can’t wait to start now).

Playing in Photoshop

The first thing that I did when I got my software package from school was bust out a box of old family photos and try my hand and learning my way around Photoshop. These are my first attempts at photo restoration and although they aren’t excellent quality restorations, they are not bad for a first time user.

These were all done back in December of 2009. My skills in Photoshop have improved considerably and I am very excited to start my Digital Image Manipulation class in July so that I can learn even more about the tools available and techniques that I might use to achieve some of the high-end cool Photoshop work that I have seen.

This is a photo of my grandma (my mom’s mom) with one of my uncles. The biggest issue with this one was just the fact that it is very dirty. There wasn’t a lot to do here.

The next photo is of my mom when she was about six years old. She was all dressed up for some sort of Christmas program at school and I believe she was a snowflake or something like that. This is a negative and is on very flimsy paper that has quite a bit of age related damage. There is a spot on the face that I wasn’t able to fix very well but it did turn out OK. My mom had me print this so she could frame it for my grandma for Christmas that year.

This last photo is of my great-great grandfather (my grandma’s grandfather on her mother’s side… he is the handsome fellow on the left). As you can see in the before image, this is a very badly damaged photo. I did my best with this one but there were a couple of places that I just could fix with the stamp tool. All in all it does look much better.

Really Old Photo Play

These are some very old images that I created using Microsoft Publisher long before I ever dreamed of going to school for graphic design or took my art seriously in any way. I would have to say that these are at least five years old, some of them older. Now that I use the Adobe Creative Suite to do things like this I can hardly believe that I was able to do as much as I managed to do in Publisher.

Some of these are from a project that I did for Christmas and some were just playing around to see what I could do. I guess after so many years of only having Publisher and Paint to work in I was bound to pick up some nifty tricks along the way.