That’s not true.

I haven’t been.

But I DID this week! The color popping assignment was a lot of fun. I’ll admit I got a little bit of a hand cramp erasing the black and white image to reveal the colored layer.  Did anyone else find a less complicated way of popping the color than putting a black and white copy of the image over the original and erasing the top layer over the part you wanted? It worked – it was just a bit tiresome.

Here’s what I came up with!

This picture is from PRISM Prom this past fall, where the theme was “Pretty in Pink.”   The balloons and pom-poms really stood out in this picture so I decided to pop the pink.  I really like how it turned out.  I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to do it this way though because the pinks are different shades.

Like I said, it was a pretty simple process.  Open the image in GIMP, open another copy of it and paste it over the original after converting it to black and white.  After that, you can choose the eraser option (on transparent setting) and erase away the black and white part over where your color is. Ta-da!

When I saw the splash of color assignment, I knew that I had to do it!! I actually saw some pictures online one time that had a splash of color in a black and white picture and LOVED them. It was before my DS days so I didn’t understand how they did it. Well one day, I will be as good as those people.

I downloaded the Color Effects app on my iPhone. This made doing this particular assignment very fun and easy to do. The only annoying part is that I had to be really careful not to go outside of the lines because you color with your finger. This was my first picture:

This was when the fire alarm went off during my Tuesday night class and the firemen came. It was all I could do not to take pictures for this class – I knew I would catch something good. I wasn’t happy with the splash on this picture because it looks weird. So I kept doing them:

This picture {of my boyfriend’s nephew} is taken from above – I was trying to experiment with the perspective of the picture. I chose to splash his eyes because he has the most beautiful color blue eyes ever! Isn’t he just the cutest???

I think everyone knows why I chose to splash these colors — THE RAVENS won the Superbowl!!!! Wahoo! I was rooting for them because I wanted Michael Oher to win a Superbowl!

I loved doing this assignment and it was pretty easy to do. Now, I find myself looking at things like “what could I color splash with this?” :) You could say DS has officially changed my life!!

Another really fun 2 star assignment- Splash the color! I’ve always wondering who once does this. Apparently you can do it in Photoshop, but I don’t have that on my computer. I looked under the “tutorial” section and noticed that former ds106er Anapaula downloaded iSplash Free on her Iphone to complete this assignment. So I did the same.

After downloading it, I started playing around with the program. It’s simple to use. My only “complaint” is that you have to use your finger on the phone screen (obvisiously) and so if you want to do small detailed pictures you most likely will “color outside the lines” and it’s really difficult to make it “perfect”. I’m sure if you used Photoshop, it’s less of a problem.

So I got so into it that I completely zoned out in the library (embarrassing!) I was listening to Pandora and just played around with pictures for a good 20 minutes! So I have several examples. A few I had some trouble with the “coloring outside the lines”, but I think overall they turned out very well for using a phone app!

I have the cutest story about this older (both in their 90s) couple. Married for 72 years and have never had a cross word with one another (according to her). She has alzheimer’s, he does not. Yet, he moved into the memory care unit when she did so they could stay together. That is true and unconditional love! They are both the sweetest! They live in the same unit as my grandmother, that’s how I know them!

This is at a Target in Lancaster, PA. It just made me laugh and smile! I love that the Amish go to Target!

Of course Maggie had to make an appearance!

I made ornaments for my friends as part of their Christmas gifts!

This one was cool.  I ended up just stumbling across this assignment even though it was one of the suggested ones for the week.

Really not that hard to do.  Took me a little time to think of something to take a picture of and then thinking of a good background.  I ended up picking the lighter because it was bright and would really jump out against a background.  Then I decided on the side of my front porch because I thought it was an interesting background because there was a lot going on.  The angle of the shot took me a while to figure out because I wanted to get as little of the wall and as much of the background as I could.  Getting the size of the lighter was important too.

After all that, I loaded it into Gimp into two different frames.  I made the one frame black and white with the color adjustments and the other one I used to cut out the orange color of the lighter.  After cutting the orange out, I copied that into another picture so I could remove the BIC label for no apparent reason.  I just wanted to.  Then I copied everything I had left, and pasted it into the black and white frame, moving it around so it fit right on the image.  And that was it.

To continue my Visual Assignments quest, I chose a 2 star assignment called Splash the Color, from the ds106 Assignment Bank.  I used to dabble in color splashing on my iPhone (just for fun), so I already had the App to do this assignment.

I chose the photo I wanted to color splash by finding a subject that was very vibrant and would stand out against a black and white background.  This is the original photo:

I emailed the photo to myself so that I could have it on my iPhone and saved it to my camera roll.

I opened the photo in the app Color Splash and painted the birds to be color and the background to be black and white.  I then saved the final product to my camera roll, emailed it to myself, opened it on my computer, and uploaded it to Flickr.  Et voilà!

Finally, I had to share my blog via Twitter!

#ds106 #VisualAssignments Check out my Color Splash blog & photo! ds106.larahampson.com/canon-ball/

— Lara Hampson (@l_hampson23) February 12, 2013