I’m astonished to announce that the assignment idea for ds106 that Prof. Lockman devised yesterday actually has merit. The Troll Steals Axe Challenge allows all of you digital story telling students to hone your Photoshop skills (or Aviary or Gimp) as you pull a portion from one image and blend it in to another.

I took the liberty to submit the assignment through the ds106 assignment submission form. After a short wait it then appeared as Visual Assignment #188.

You are all encouraged to think up your own assignment ideas and submit them to the ds106 system. That would all be considered part of bringing the ‘A’ game.

What remains to be done is for a useful tutorial specifically for this assignment to be created. I’ve given up hope on Prof. Lockman being able to rise to the occasion. As I’m headed back to Davos to fix the unfolding media situation involving Soros’s team and the #OWS project, I’m afraid I can’t do it now. But I will share the basic steps of my process.

If working with layers in the image editing softwares is a new experience, you are encouraged to consult Pinkzap’s tutorial which shows how to put Paris Hilton’s and Leonardio DiCaprio’s faces on to a famous movie poster. The same technique applies to the Troll Steals Axe Contest assignment.

Here there are the basic stops for this TSAC assignment featuring Yngwei, Ricky and Chet:

1. The bottom image is of a Hamer Futura (which was a replica introduced by Hamer in 1974 after Gibson ceased production of it’s iconic Explorer). I used the pen tool to draw a path around the instrument which was then converted to a selection (on the path tab of the layers window). 
2. This selection was inverted so that the entire black portion of the photo was selected. This selection was deleted (black became white).
3. The magic want selection too was used to select the white background – this selection was inverted so that just the guitar was selected (perhaps steps 2 and 3 are redundant). The selected Hamer guitar was then copied.
4. Moving over to the image of the scowling guitarist with the white Fender Stratocaster, the copied Hamer guitar was then pasted as a new layer atop the scowling guitarist as the background layer.
5. The Free Transform tool was used to alter the size and orientation of the Hamer to match roughly that of the Fender.
6. The Lasso tool was used to make a roughly circular selection around the scowling guitarist’s left hand (the one on the fret board). This selection was copied and pasted as new layer atop the Hamer layer.
7. The eraser tool was used to remove everything but the guys hand – so it now looks as though he is holding the neck of the Hamer.
8. Going back to the background layer, the Clone tool was used to “air brush” away parts of the Stratocaster that stuck out from behind the Hamer. The line of his and his hairy chest proved especially challenging to clone. 
9. Finally the image was “Saved for Web” as a PNG-24 and looks like this:

The riff was extracted from an mp3 file using an audio editor which was then saved as a new mp3. The new was then uploaded to my public DropBox folder. The public URL for that file was inserted in the bit of of code that enables the Flash Player above. Gordon explains this process and has the code snippet for you to copy.

I’ll trust all of you students to figure this out. I’d been hoping to visit the New York and Tokyo iterations of the course this week to aid in your learning. But I’m sort of at the mercy of the deteriorating situation over in Davos. I will need to go incommunicado until I’ve fixed things.