If you love HGTV (Home and Garden Television), please raise your hands.

Apparently, we’re not alone. Look! Here’s proof.

Even though I’ve completed my fair share of HGTV marathons (and will never stop so help me), I’ll be the first to admit that it’s pure mind-numbing crap. Let’s be real here. If you’ve seen one episode you’ve pretty much seen it all- the script doesn’t vary too much.

Natural light, open concept, hardwood, curb appeal, countertops…

Sometimes the network is so formulaic you can’t help but groan. (And you still can’t help but love it!)

For this visual assignment, I decided to poke a little fun at the TV network we all love despite our better judgement.

This picture was taken at the Annual Gingerbread House Contest and Exhibit at George Washington’s Ferry Farm right outside of downtown Fredericksburg. Every year, children and adults compete in the historic themed event (this year’s theme: Where Did George Washington Sleep?). All the concepts are original, every piece must be edible, and all the gingerbread must be homemade. If you haven’t been and love local history, dessert, and/or Christmas, I highly recommend that everyone check it out next year. As far as holiday activities go, the contest ranks easily among my top seasonal highlights. Every year my friends and I attend, and everyone is encouraged to cast their ballots for the Best in Show award. In the picture you see me and my best friend Ryan carefully judging an excellent replica. If anything we take the competition a little too seriously; carefully considering the craftsmanship, skill appropriate for the age level, level of detail, architectural integrity, and historic accuracy. A little obsessive, yes, but there’s a lot of hard work that goes into these and electoral participation is not something I take lightly!

The process:

Canva.com is my go-to website for fast and easy picture editing. I use it for my job as a receptionist for our social media posts all the time, so at this point I’m very comfortable with it. To get started, first look for the green “Create a design” button on the left hand side of the homepage. You then have to pick the dimensions for the design- I selected “Social Media”, the first option, since I wanted a square image. Then, select “Uploads,” which will be the bottom button on the left-hand toolbar. Upload your image and crop it as desired. To overlay the speech bubbles, I clicked on “Elements” from the left-hand toolbar, then typed in “speech bubble.” Hundreds of options will appear, and you can select, drag, resize, and rotate the bubble of your choice onto your image. I turned down the opacity of the bubbles so that you could see some of the image underneath. I then selected “Text” from the left-hand toolbar, and placed the text boxes on top of the bubbles. I changed the text color to white for maximum contrast and readability. I then downloaded the image by clicking “Download” on the top right of the page, and uploaded the image to Flickr.

“Learn to love yourself, grab a picture of yourself in which your body language, actions, gestures, etc. suggest one thing and then play off that using a speech bubble. Ideally the result would make people laugh—but I must acknowledge there are other possible emotional responses that may be just as acceptable.”

My Spubble shows me on long and exhausting day of the Spring Concert, which was followed by Bluegrass and BBQ the next day. In total I worked 24 ho I have chosen to go into the field of higher education which is very rewarding and usually not as tiring as the last week of classes was this year.  Still even when I was exhausted I realized how happy I was to be going into the Student Affairs field as I saw students at our sold out concert have a great time.  That doesn’t mean those two days didn’t kick my ass.

The picture was actually taken by Dean Jones, so I had to contact her in order to receive the photograph.  After I received it I uploaded it to Canva.com,a website that I am super comfortable using after working in publicity in my organization in the past year.  I laid a large square over the picture and downed the transparency  to add a tint to the photo.  I searched for a speech bubble and found the one I liked.  I changed the colors of it to fall more in line with the shirts we are wearing in the photo.  I turned the transparency down on the speech bubble as well before adding the text over the speech bubble. I then downloaded the edited photograph as a JPEG from Canva and uploaded it on flickr. and embedded it into this post.

The idea behind this Visual Assignment was to play off of a picture in which your body language suggest one thing by using a speech bubble.

As I mentioned in my “About Me”, the last time I used twitter was in 10th grade. With high school comes a lot of drama. I don’t like drama, which is why I tend to opt out of social media sites. This time on the other hand is different. As much as I was dreading having to sign up for multiple sites (for example: Twitter), I am actually kind of excited about this. This picture might look like disappointment but I was actually laughing in this. I find it funny that although I did not want a twitter, I am somewhat eager about it. This class has so may interactive projects so it’s cool to get a chance to see what other’s are creating. Inserting this bubble text was pretty simple also. I pulled up the “Preview” app on my Mac and simply inserted a thought bubble. I then edited the bubble and  WAHHH-LAHHH now we have a Spubble !

http://assignments.ds106.us/assignments/your-very-own-spubble/

Camp poster assignment from ds106 assignment bank