Visual Assignments

Surreal Panorama

Create a surreal panorama by first making a panorama (duh), and then munipulating the photograph to make it out of this world. However, don’t go out and just make a panorama via your iPhone!!! Take some pictures and mash them together!

Back to basics

Choose a photo of anything that you want to make a stencil out of using Photoshop or some other editing software. Using your software, remove the color and make the image appear to be a stencil instead of an actual photo. Take notice of how this changes the focus of the image.

Patent Pending

Google has a magic search for all sorts of patent drawings. There is really amazing stuff in there that is both old and new. Find something you really like and turn it into the kind of image you’d have hanging on your wall. That could mean making it look vintage, excising pieces, using it as the source for something totally new. 

Chimeratic Composition

Take at least three pictures (your own or someone else’s) mash them together into something that makes them more than the sum of their parts, something that would have been impossible in real life. Include the original images so we can see how they build on one another to make your final composition.

Full post example is over here.

Journey to Somewhere

Create a Google Presentation “slideshow” of 9-12 images about a journey to somewhere. This may be interpreted literally or mterphorically.

Apophenia

Find something in your house. Take a picture. Let your imagination churn. Make as many different augmented versions as you can think of. Help others see what’s in your head.

Additional examples are here.

Illustrating Odd Autocompletes

Google Autocomplete is an oracle with strange powers to bring oddities into your life. This assignment asks you to seek out that randomness. Start with a strong phrase (things like “I hate . . .” or “I love . . . ” seem to work well.) and run through the alphabet looking for really odd autocompletes. When you find a good one, screen capture it and create an illustration that represents the search string.

Glitch Art

Glitch art is a genre of art based around digital artefacts. A digital artefact is the unexpected result of when a technology breaks. An artefact could be sound of a CD skipping or pixilation on a highly compressed Youtube video. Glitch has been called the “art of the artefact” and stretching the intended use of a device or file.  

Historical Selfies

Selfies are pretty terrible and associated with massive amounts of ego. Take the hubris and arrogance exemplified by Selfies at Funerals and Rich Kids of Instagram and apply them to a historical or literary figure on the eve of an impending disaster.

You can see more examples and get a Photoshop template file here.

Story Telling Timeline

Using layers in an image editing program make a time line that tells a story. Tips: make it short and include events that lead up to the main event.