A turtle is lifted gently into sky, passing through clouds and watching the world shrink below him. He wants to look down so badly, yet he can’t bring himself to approach the edge. The sky has never seemed bright until now.
I picked this old picture of me holding a baby box turtle as I had an idea for it. The idea of me being a giant to him, and how he might’ve felt as I held him up. I’ve always had a soft spot for them, and since releasing them into the wild I figured it’d be nice to have one of them as the main focus for an assignment. I used a photo editor built into my computer to add filters and edits, saved the image, then went back into the editor to double the effects. I wanted it to look blurry and cloudy as if he was… well, in the middle of a cloud. I also wanted the picture to remain vibrant despite the amount of light in the image, so I bumped that up as well.
Step 1: Find two photos that you want to alter. I am currently in the process of switching jobs! And naturally I don’t want to work at all. I would much rather be at the beach, relaxing, sleeping… anything but working.
Step 2: Open Microsoft Word and insert both photos. One photo is from the beach and the other is of someone working… how worlds collide. I was going to use a photo editor, but started playing around with Microsoft Word and found out there is a possibility of doing it on there! This is an upper hand for not having to download sketchy software or opening weird websites.
Step 3: Remove the background of the photo that you want to add/lay on top of the other photo. This is done by selecting the photo that you want to Edit > Picture Format > Remove Background. It will automatically generate the background parts it believes will need to be removed, but also has to option to select areas to remove/keep. This takes some playing around with to edit on how you want the final result to look. Step 4: Add some text! Make the photo a bit more interesting and add context to it. I wanted it to look like a thought bubble so I added a shape. I went to the Insert tab > Shapes > Callouts and added text.
Step 4: Saving it as an image! I was not able to erase of the bottom parts of the computer/desk area enough to how I wanted to, so I am going to crop it as a photo to make it how I want. To do this I am going to use the Snip & Sketch feature on my computer. This application can be accessed by the Start menu or selecting the Windows icon, Shift and S all at the same time.
Step 6: Job transition… I mean, final product! We are here! Working from home at the beach… I mean completing the project! Overall super cool to find out Microsoft Word has this feature when I have been possibly opening unsafe websites trying to do other assignments. Save the image as JPG, PNG, or GIF and name accordingly.
Dreams do come true? We finally made it.
I am leaving my jo of 3 years… I have been here since I was 20 and just turned 23 in mid May. It feels bittersweet and the rest is unknown, but I have been complacent. If you want to hear a couple more of my thoughts regarding my job change, check out my Soundcloud below!
This assignment was to “Take an existing image and change the concept in where you are at and what you are doing.”. So that is exactly what I did. Here I am at the beach at sunset at the Outerbanks in North Carolina in my graduation cap and gown…. but wait that’ts not right that didn’t happen. Here was why I came up with this idea.
This year my sister was suppose to graduate high school with the class of 2020. Sadly that did not happen because of Corona and having to stay at home. One of our family friends owns a beach house and had a very fun idea. Our little family friend group has 4 seniors graduating this year. So they decided why don’t we have a beach graduation and have our own ceremony! So June 18-21 we will be celebrating them… wearing fun outfits, taking picture, making a fun speech, and just hanging out!
I decided to redo the image of myself and anna inside the resistance base. Here is that original photo: Also here is that post if you wanted to take a look at it: Here is the new photo of Anna and me with Obama. We were invited to the White House. It was pretty cool … Continue reading “Are we there yet? Version 2.0”
i tried using gimp again! am i supposed to introduce gimp with an article? i hope not! regardless of the answer, my affinity for both no caps and random caps For Emphasis should alert my fair readers to a certain. nixing of traditional grammatical structure in favor of ~Aesthetics~. but back to gimp! the prompt i undertook called to “take an existing image & change the concept in where you are at & what you are doing” the phrasing for this assignment confused me a little at first, so i looked to the examples for confirmation. and it was there that i found the work of fellow umw ds106 Kyle! def rec checking out his creation here!
so without further ado, here is what i ended up with!
so theres a lot to unpack here, but lets start with basic process. i started with this photo
which i took on one of the actually pretty & not freezing days we had last week! so my immediate thought for this photo is TIGHTROPE, because the way im hanging on to the tree there is reminiscent of an unskilled tightrope walker! so! i googled tightrope, the skyscraper tightrope, because dream big, right? & thus decided i liked this photo
i like the way it has an actual tightrope person on it, i like the contrast. From there, i put the first photo, the one of me on the tree, into gimp & started erasing the background. learning gimp pt 1. i couldn’t figure out how to make the eraser bigger and with harsher edges, so i googled it! eventually, through a mix of google and clicking around, i found the modify your eraser tab & did just that! However, the first thing i actually did was google how to merge to images in gimp, & watched a video that told me i had to put the nixing background image on an alpha channel. so i did that & THEN, after modifying my eraser, i zoomed in and out of my photo to try and nix as much background as possible. then i added the skyscraper photo into gimp & essentially spent an hour playing with dimensions and trying to get both of them to be on the same screen on top of each other. i had this Very Weird thing that kept happening in which i would open the me as a layer on top of the skyscrapers, and then when i dragged me on top of them it created a blank space rather than a photo of me. i shouldve snapped a screenshot but alas yorick (& does anyone have any idea what and/or why that was?). alls well that ends well however, because i eventually got some good dimensions and good placement and ended up with a pretty funky fun final product!
gimp, as i have mentioned NUMEROUS times in previous posts, is really really hard for me to work and figure out, so even though this is Clearly Edited, i’m really happy with it and proud of myself for not giving up! a few things i do wish i could have thought through better do exist though. For example, since a tightrope is much thinner than a tree trunk, there is a good chunk of my leg and arm that is missing from the photograph. i tried shaping what leg i did have to seem naturally hidden behind the other, but i’m not sure how well i really did on that bit. additionally, i gave myself a little bit of a haircut rather than go Crazy stupid on the background erasing between literal strands of hair, but i don’t think that’s as noticeable.
Overall a fun assignment and i enjoyed taking my pic out of context and making me seem Really Cool and Brave. Although using gimp was difficult, i ended up actually mastering a few of the tools thanks to perseverance and hard work (& this youtube video & this youtube video & this website page & this website page). i did a lot of googling :).
For this assignment, I decided to take a picture of my girlfriend and me from Oktoberfest in downtown Fredericksburg and put us on a resistance base in Star Wars. We love and have watched the entire series multiple times, so it just felt right.
I picked this because I am on the soccer team. This is my last year and there is nothing more than to win a CAC championship. So are we champions yet??DesignAssignments, DesignAssignments1668
I used this assignment to think about all of the places my best friend and I want to travel to. We both talk about traveling after college all of the time so I thought this was a great assignment to think about where to travel to.
I love my grandparents and I love the beach.My best day ever would be to go to the beach with my grandparents.How fun would that be?!That was my inspiration for this project.For my design project, Are we there Yet, I was asked to change the concept of where I am and what I am doing.I chose to use one of my new favorite apps, Photoshop Mix. I love this app because it gives you a large variety of stock photos.I will explain the process and include screenshots for clarification.
I uploaded a picture of me with my grandparents and a stock photo of the beach into the app. Then I used the cut out feature to take away the background around us.The auto feature took away almost everything in the background and a little it of my head.I then used the smart feature with add and delete to get us looking beachy.
I will give you a couple of tips.First, make sure that when you choose the photo that you are removing the background of, there is a strong contrast between the subject and the background.In my case, my hair blended in with the brick wall making it hard to get a clean cut.Second, it does take several tries and a steady hand to get it just right.Be patient and don’t drink too much coffee before trying!Once I was happy with the editing, I moved our image onto the beach in the perfect spot.This was simple to do and fin to play around with different looks.I was also able to use the tabs to resize the photo and adjust color and contrast.Adjusting the color and contrast helped to make the separate images seamless.
For week two of our digital design assignments, we were prompted with creating an image showing us in a new place in the assignment Are We There Yet?
I used an App on my phone called Superimposed that helped me very carefully manually trace myself out, then paste my new cut out shape onto a cool background!
I decided I wanted my image to appear as though I had just traveled to a nice, peaceful, beautiful countryside and had decided to take a selfie! After I decided my design and created it through my app, I emailed the image to myself, downloaded the image then uploaded it to my Flickr account so I could embed it here!
