Another assignment I chose for this week was the “A Place I’ve Never Been” (3.5 stars) assignment. Seeing as I haven’t been to a lot of places, I had quite a few choices! One of my good friends lives in Mexico City, so traveling to Mexico has been on my mind for the past few months, so I decided to do Mexico for my assignment. I used two pictures in a collage using Gimp, and added text to show where the images were from. Here it is!
This assignment I choose because it hits a little close to home, not the assignment itself but the place I chose to represent that I have never gone before. If you can’t tell by the picture I chose Thailand. Even though it was way before I was born, my father was stationed there during the Vietnam War. He was in the Air Force and did a lot of things during that time. He has pictures that he has shown me from when he was stationed there and some of his friends there with him. Some who made it and others who didn’t. Even though that wasn’t a part of the “active warzone” they flew the planes back and forth and repaired ones that were damaged and in the process of going in and out of these war areas is where the danger was. There is a still a lot that I can tell he is holding back, but that is what goes along with being in war. I made a collage of the different aspects that he liked about it, one being the water and beach area scenery, another being the architecture and I added a picture of a map so people can see along the lines of where its at. I got these images from google because I didn’t want to include my dads pictures seeing as how most of them included other people and average military stuff, so instead I tried to focus on the beauty and happy side of Thailand!
How on earth can it already be time for final projects? I’m having a hard time believing that the semester is almost over!!
About a week ago we came up with ideas for our final projects. You can find my original idea here. Just to give you a heads up this is not exactly what I am doing for my final project any longer. The more I got to playing around the more elaborate my story became. I do not want to give too much away right now about all the little changes because I still want to make my final reveal exciting. You’re going to just have to wait to see my final outcome.
For our final project besides coming up with an elaborate story, we also had to plan out and do around 15-20 stars of assignments. These assignments could we any of the different types of media as long as we used three of them. Here is my first assignment:
For my first assignment I did A Place I’ve Never Been. For this assignment you were to create a photo collage or illustration of a place you’ve never been to. I decided to use Nashville, Tennessee as my place for this assignment.
I completed this assignment using gimp. I started off with this picture of Nashville
and cut it out using the free select tool until all of the sky was out of the picture.
This process was a bit tedious but I was pleased with how it came out. I then inserted my picture over the Tennessee flag and cut the white away again to make it look like this.
I ended up getting stuck here for a little while. I quickly decided that I was not a fan of the flag in the background but I wasn’t sure what else to add. After a lot of google searching an some trial and error I ended up finding a plan grey background that I thought really showed off the buildings instead of taking away from them.
I then found this picture of a Nashville sign and I cut the sign away from the background just like I did with my original picture. I then pasted that on the top part of my design and played with the sizing until it looked how I wanted it to.
Here is my final product. I’m pretty happy with how it turned out. Hope you enjoy!
Creating Commons media is something of a treat for me. I always enjoy the idea of creating something that someone else may have the fortune to use another day. Reason being, the internet is so diluted with the idea of making money, and that’s not what the internet was created for. Wikipedia has the same mantra when it comes to using the internet, they believe its a place meant for information that’s not only reliable and accurate, but free as well. That’s one of the aims I hope as a society we get away from, the idea that everything has to be monetized. Artists and graphic designers can, in their own way, contribute to this by using creative commons licenses.
For my GIFt assignment, I originally was looking for old cell phone ads, but then realized that old cell phones didn’t really have a huge screen, making a GIFt pretty much meaningless. So I decided to search old vintage magazine ads online and came across this one for nylon stockings. The original is the woman holding a stack of books, and all I did was take out the stack.
Here they are side by side:
Original Nylons Ad
Surprise GIFt
For the second design assignment, I created a collage of images that would come together to form a place that I’ve never been to, but have always wanted to go. For this I used an image of Macchu Picchu, a picture of a ceremonial devil statue, some clouds and some spanish tilings.
For the third design assignment, we were supposed to create a book cover and use only six words to title the memoir. Given my life as a drinker, a floozy and a storyteller, this cover seemed appropriate:
For the fourth and final design assignment, we were to create a motivational poster. I hate the cliche boring posters, so I decided to take a comedic spin on them:
Well not just yet…
For my next 2-star assignment I chose “A place I’ve Never Been before.” I saw this over on Brittany’s blog (her’s is amazing) and new I wanted to do it too.
The premise behind this assignments is to just pick a place you’ve never been before and create a photo collage/illustration of that place. There are a lot of places I’ve never been, but want to go so I figured it would be hard to decide upon one choice, but a conversation with my mom earlier this evening ended my search quite quickly.
First, I have to provide some background information. My dad works in Jordan, yes the country in the Middle East! He’s been there about 2 years now and my mom and I have yet to go visit him because of work and school schedules, among other things. He’s come home a bunch of times, which is awesome, but I’ve been wanted to go visit him and Jordan for some time now. My parents were talking earlier today and my dad suggested that we try to come over sometime this summer! So I think we are going to go late July, early August. I’m sure it will be 120 degrees Fahrenheit (HA!) but I’m excited about the possibility of going this summer!
So that’s how I came about my decision to pick Jordan. For this college, I picked the country’s Flag, camels, and Petra- which we will probably go to on our trip. I’m obsessed with camels (they are so cute!) and I’m most excited about the ability to get to ride one while we are there! It’s been a dream of mine!
I got all the picture from google, uploaded them into GIMP and used the free select tool on the camel and Petra. I actually flipped both photos so as not to interfere with the star on the flag. For the name, I went into PicMonkey and then imported it into GIMP. I’m just not a fan of using the fonts in GIMP.
I like the way it turned out! Have you ever ridden a camel?
Star Point Total: 14/15
Let me start off this post by saying that I totally wish I was British. If the accents weren’t enough some of the most adorable people ever are from there (think Sophia Grace and Rosie and One Direction). So when I came across A Place I’ve Never Been I knew I had to do it. This assignment was worth two stars and the directions were “create a photo collage or illustration of a place you’ve never been to.”
To make my collage I used gimp. To start off I used a picture of the British flag as my back ground. I then opened a picture of the London Bridge in a new screen. On this screen I cut the bridge out form the background by using the free select tool. To be completely honest, this took quite some time. At first I was trying to cut the whole background out at once. I quickly realized that there was no way that was going to work without loosing my mind. Instead I ended up taking chunks out little by little until my picture looked like this: 
I then copied and pasted this onto the flag background that I had previously created. I had hopes that since I had just gotten rid of the background in a different screen that it would remain gone. Sadly this did not happen. I was going to go back and take the back ground out completely again but as I was going I realized that I liked it much better with a little bit of white around the edges. After I finally got my picture cut out and on the background, I was trying to decide how to put London on there somewhere. I originally was going to type it on there but I was anything but pleased with how it looked. I decided to take an old London Olympic poster and crop the word London out of it so I had this (which looked way cooler than any font I had on my computer):
I then pasted the word London onto my project. I played around a little bit on exactly where I had wanted it.
Overall I am thrilled with how this turned out. Who would of thought I’d like design week more than visual week? Not me!
Hope you find this lovely! Only ten more stars to go!
Despite my being German, I have never been to Germany–there is hope of this changing soon,though, if my parents move to Germany this year. (WOO!) In honor of never having been to the Motherland, and of potentially going, I did my “Place I’ve Never Been” Assignment on Germany. This particular picture is of Dom, a cathedral in Cologne, Germany. The beautiful structure dominates the skyline. The other landmark that is evident in this picture is Hohenzollern bridge (also, in Cologne).
I uploaded it and edited it in Photoshop. I used various different tools to achieve the poster-esque look. I also darkened the picture, to give it more of an eerie feel. Comments and constructive criticism are always welcome.
It has been my dream to visit Australia for some time now. Mostly to snorkel in the Great Barrier Reef. I would love to experience the diversity of fish and sea creatures that the coast has to offer. It also has unique wildlife such as kangaroos and Koala Bears. These are the thoughts that went through my head when I came across the assignment A Place I’ve Never Been.
For my collage I included some key elements to Australia. For some reason orange is the color that always comes to my mind with Australia. Something about the sands and the sunset really screams orange to me. I used that as the background color along with an outline of the actual continent. The next element was the Great Barrier reef. It is one of the seven wonders in the world and in the top 5 places I want to visit. I also included the Sydney Opera House because of it being an iconic symbol and architecture for Australia. The last key element was a Kangaroo. Many Kangaroo species are endemic to Australia (meaning they are only found on that continent) and have also become a symbol.
To create this collage I resorted to google images. I knew what I was looking for and carefully chose each picture. I then used Pixlr to crop pictures and place them together. I had first crop the smaller pictures and copy them onto a layer that was the outline of the continent. I then re-positioned each in a way I thought fit. I think used my snipping tool to take a picture of the image so I could add text. I uploaded the image to Microsoft Powerpoint and added a text box. I included the name of the continent as well as the slogan by which it is known for. The typography was quite tricky. I wanted something bold, but nothing seemed to fit. I just kept trying different ones until I came across “Matisse”. It fit the somewhat tribal theme of Australia and really brought the image together.
To find out more about Australia visit here.
Sandy Brown Jensen
This collage image was made with an iPad ap called Mixel. Because I don’t usually believe that an image tells its own story without words, I wrote a poem to go with it–not to make it less mysterious, but to add to the mystery and speak to it.
In high school, I was obsessed. There was a time when I listened exclusively to BBC1 Radio. I knew more about British TV shows than American. I could name British celebrities. I knew Alexa Chung and Russell Brand before most of America. I loved Simon Amstell and watched Popworld. I’d speak in a (what I’m sure sounded ridiculous) British accent. My iTunes was filled with Girls Aloud and McFly and The Saturdays. I’d go to bookstores to buy the UK versions of Cosmo and Elle. I knew British slang. Like I said, obsessed.
To do this assignment, I used Adobe Photoshop CS5 to crop the images using the polygonal lasso tool, then I saved the cropped sections of the images and used iaza to make the background transparent. After that was done, I put all the images together to form a collage on top of a London-inspired print. When I first read this assignment, I pictured what the end result would look like, and this is exactly what I’d hoped it would turn out to be.
