For this week’s required assignment, Are We There Yet, we had to take an existing photo and change something such as the background so it seems the subject of the photo is in a completely different place. My boyfriend has recently gotten into rebuilding cub cadets and although I don’t know much, I’ll still help out with the little things in the garage. I took a picture of one of his rebuilds in our driveway and combined it with the well-known windows xp background. After all, mowers do belong on the grass.

I used gimp for the very first time for this assignment. As of now, I’m not a big fan but that’s likely to be because I’m still learning. And learning can easily lead to frustration. Something like this looks like it took less than 5 minutes to do but it took me about 45 minutes to do. I had to watch some YouTube videos on gimp and mess around with the tools a bit until I came up with something. I know gimp has some really cool features and I hope to learn more about them. Who knows, maybe I’ll learn something that can be used outside of this class.

Click to view slideshow.

Talk about a difficult assignment, eh?

For today’s design assignment, I went ahead and did the required assignment where we cut out a person or people from a photo and place them somewhere else. My poor fiancé is going to be thrilled with the picture I chose…

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

I’m sorry, I had to get that out of the way. A little background on why this is funny; my fiancé and I are in the process of discussing where we would like to go for our honeymoon. I want something Disney, he wants a cruise. So, the natural compromise would be a mother freakin’ Disney cruise, right? Well, he’s trying to convince me otherwise and then this majestic picture happened.

For this assignment, I used “PicMonkey” as my editor and cut out a picture of my fiancé from our trip to California. The cutting process was frustrating and I definitely could have done a better job (though my graphic designer of a future husband thinks it’s decent for a first time), but it did the job of getting the background of LA out of the way. Then I found a photo from the Disney Cruise website, set it as the background and used his face as the overlay and TA-DA! Disney Magic, ya’ll!!

I wonder if anyone else was having difficulty in this assignment? Definitely worth the three stars provided, am I right?

Taylor

For the mandatory design assignment we had to take an image that we have and change it to be something else. The original image is of me and my brother during Christmas many years ago. The image I used to change it is of snow covered mountains. The reason I did it this way is because when I found the image of me and my brother I thought It looks like he’s carrying me and then I thought that It would be terrible to have to carry me up a mountain. So that’s how I changed it.

The original two images:

And that turned into this:

Achieving this was fairly simple. First, get the images. I just went online and found a picture from my brothers Facebook. I then took both images into GIMP and began to trim the photo of my brother and I so that nothing of that background was left. I then scaled it and the mountains so they looked appropriate.

I ended up moving them around so the hard cut off edges matched both images and resized to make them work together. Then merged and exported.

The purpose of this assignment is to take an existing image and change the concept in where you are and what you are doing.

I started with a picture I had taken at a clinic a couple years ago.

I used a photo editing application, called Movavi, to remove the background and add a new background. The new background I chose was a picture of Earth from the Moon.

In my end product, I wanted it to appear as though the horse and rider pair were jumping over the Earth.

This assignment is worth 3 stars and the link can be found here.

For this assignment, I looked through some of my photos and thought I’d try and have some fun with it. I looked through my pictures and I found this one of me as a long haired 6th grader as well as a picture of the Rappahannock River. I went through photoshop on my phone and cut out a picture of me getting off the bus in my Safety Patrol belt. I then placed it at the river, as if I was there in my belt, as a sixth grader just enjoying the river. Got my feet in the water and I’m just having a good time.

I’m a person who loves scary stories – I like ghost stories, stories about weird creatures, and stories about hearing a tap-tap-tap on the window but no one is there. I love them even though they scare the living daylights out of me. Usually after a spooky-show-bender, I have to watch a few episodes of something light-hearted like Bob’s Burgers or The Office to get rid of the thought that there’s a super scary ghost waiting for me outside my window right now!!!

I wrote on my about me page that I’m terrified of bigfoot. I don’t know why, but I just am. He may very well be a super chill dude, but I’m not about that bigfoot life. For the Are We There Yet? design assignment, I thought I’d poke some fun at myself for being so scared of something that probably isn’t even real. Probably. It better not be. Inspired by the iconic Patterson-Gimlin film, spooky trailcam pictures (this was the only site I could find whose list of photos didn’t include animal death, so fair warning if you’re thinking about googling ), and clickbait YouTube thumbnails, I present to you…

A while ago, I was in a bookstore with a friend of mine when she sent me the following picture of myself. It’s already horrifying on its own. My posture! Add in the creepy factor of receiving a picture of yourself when you’re in public. What the heck, man? Here I am, wandering aimlessly, holding a Totoro plush that I never bought, looking like Gollum in a wig, completely unaware that there is a candid picture of myself waiting to be opened. Not cool, but it sets the mood for my creepy Are We There Yet design challenge.

I needed a good forested background, so I hit Creative Commons to search for one. Mr. Loren Kerns‘ photo was perfect for what I wanted, and allowed adaptations. Woo! Here’s how I spookified myself.

Having made this, I don’t feel any less afraid of Bigfoot, but it does make me want to run past someone else’s trailcam.

Design Assigment #2

The ‘Are We There Yet?’ assignment required a lot of thought. I had to think about what background would work best with the subject I chose to use. I chose this specific photo of the people because of the position. It made it easier to photoshop (you can find the original images in the procedure section). The background was the trickier part. I had to find an image that went well with the position the subjects were sitting in. After endless trial and errors, I decided to chose a picture I took when my friends and I went hiking at Old Rag. The reason I chose this picture is first off, because I love the hiking scenario and the subject fit perfectly on top of this rock.

This assignment required a lot of steps. I had to download GIMP, which I struggled with a lot.  I even tried to use another program because GIMP was such a problem for me. After a couple of hours I finally started to get the hang of it. Below you can find the procedure on how to photoshop the images to recreate something similar to my photo.

Step 1: Upload your image and select the ‘Free Select Tool’ icon, located on the far left side.

Step 2: With the ‘Free Select Tool’ outline the desired subject

Step 3: Once you outline the image, right click on it and find the layout tab. Under the layout tab it should have the option of scaling the layout. Select it to make the image smaller.

Step 4: After you scale the image to the desired size, cut it out of the canvas by hitting ctrl + x

Step 5: In a separate document, upload the image you want as your background. Hit ctrl +v.

Step 6: Similar to step #3 right click on the layer tab, and select scale layer.

Step 7: Select the move icon on the far left side of the screen and move the layer to the desired place

Step 8: Now that you have your layer in the correct place, you can change the filter. Go to the image tab, mode, grayscale.

Step 9: Save the image. Go to the file tab and select the export option to convert the GIMP file into a .png or .jpg

Link to assignment is tagged above in ‘Design Assignment #2’

The assignment details can be found on the link bellow.

http://assignments.ds106.us/assignments/are-we-there-yet/

There were many ideas floating in my mind. I processed a few ideas in my mind like taking myself inside the sea from a shopping mall, getting in to a lion’s cade in a zoo etc. Then I decided that I had my graduation back in my home country in the recent past. I looked at a few pictures and it strikes me why not take my graduation ceremony to some place outside the university. So I took one of the photo from the graduation ceremony. I Photoshoped it and now me and my friend are under a dry tree in the desert enjoying our graduation ceremony. I bet it’s hotter than the air conditioned hall at the university but there should be at least some adventure in the life. What do you say?