umwfa12s2 – Assignment Bank

Splash of Color: A Nice Red Tie

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This is a picture of my boyfriend and I when we were going on our “fancy date” to the Olive Garden with a coupon. I know. We be cheap.

The object of this one was to take a picture we already had and add a”splash of color” or take away all the color except one. I choose my boyfriends tie because besides that we were both in black and white. This one was also two stars.

I used Gimp for this one too. I went to Facebook and redownloaded the picture (I have no clue where it is on my computer). I followed this tutorial to figure out how to do this. After I opened it and duplicated the layer, I made the picture grayscale. Then I right clicked the layer and clicked “add layer mask” and clicked the white option. For the life of me, I cannot understand how it works, but ignorance is bliss, I suppose. And then I clicked on the paintbrush tool like the tutorial told me to and painted on the tie and voila! It was red again!

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An Album Cover: With Greater Contemptment

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I really loved this assignment. It was fun and it actually sounds like it would be a real indie band. This one was two stars.

I did as I was told and found my picture, band name, and album title like the first step of the assignment says to. I really wished I had thought ahead and saved the website addresses here so I could “cite” them, but alas. Once I got all my information, I opened my picture in Gimp. From here I made the buildings blurry and added a sepia tone to it using the color balance tool. Then I added the text “Robin Hood’s Stride” (the band name) and “With Greater Contemptment” (album name) with the text tool and fooled around with the text font and color. When I finished, I realized it needed something more and added the solar flare in the upper right corner. (Here is a wonderful tutorial on how to do that because if you asked me to do it, I’d look like a fool.)

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Zac Efron is Worth Two Stars! :D

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I love Zac Efron so the fact that I get to do a Visual assignment about a celebrity and get credit (two stars) in the process is the bee’s knees XD It was easy and fun!! I just got a picture of Zac Efron off the internet along with a quote and used photoshop to make the photo and text combined (: Easy as pie! (:

This assignment by Abbie Yirrah was to find a picture of a celebrity of your choice and find a quote about that celebrity that links the two together and makes sense.

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Summarization #5

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After this week of taking photos and editing them, I can say that I LOVE pictures. You can do so much with them and change them in so many different ways. I can change an ordinary object into something spectacular with different colors and different settings. It was awesome!!

Photoblitzing was by far my favorite activity this week. It was a challenge that got me thinking quick and I got some really cool pictures. I wanted to experiment with a camera, but I couldn’t find ours at home. So I ended up using my iPhone, which I just got a few weeks ago and am still a bit challenged with. Overall I really liked the whole experience. I thought it was really cool going into the ds106photoblitz tag and seeing every one’s ideas. They are all so different! I also got quite a few extremely cute photos of my cat and dog playing. In my post I only included my favorites, but I think the whole set deserves to be shared so here it is:

Cats and Dogs do not belong together

Interesting Angle?

The End

Paw

Sad Tissues

Converging Window

Abstract Grass

Wide Open Spaces

Single Color Dominance

Ordinary to Interesting Object

And it begins…

I had so much fun looking through the visual assignment page. I really liked how we got to choose how many posts we did and which ones. Some of them I wasn’t all that interested in or looked like they would take me a lot longer than the time I had this week. I thought that was very thoughtful. There were so many to choose from. I actually ended up attempting to do two more than I needed too, but couldn’t find the right tools for one and the other I just didn’t like the product. They both were not fitting into what I had in mind so I ended up ditching them. The assignments that I did come up with turned out awesome. I’m also really glad I found Pixlr. I am starting to use this website for not only my dailycreates, but even for some of the pictures I upload to facebook. I ended up finishing 5 posts for a total of 10 stars. Each star pointage ranged from 3 to 2 to 1 stars. I posted the thought and processes behind each assignment.

A hint of Color was 2 stars

Normal to Extraordinary was 3 stars

Common Everyday Object was 2 stars

Draw it was 2 stars

Over editing was 1 star

Since I felt bad last week I neglected the daily creates a bit, I decided to contribute a daily create to the website. It was Thursdays! I am thrilled and honored that my idea was added to this class. I feel like I am leaving something great behind for other ds106ers to enjoy and get their creative juices flowing. At the begging of the week, I just had the idea in a post. I pictured me adding it to the website and even went ahead and did the dailycreate myself. Then, on Thursday I went to the site and noticed that it was added! It was so cool too look through what others had already done. It definitely made my Thursday.

This is by far my favorite daily create, but I could be a bit biased

Normally for dailycreates I like going out and taking a picture instead of uploading one I have on my computer. However, for the dailycreate of taking a picture of someone bald in your life I knew the picture that had to be used. It is of my boyfriend that passed of cancer a little over a year ago. We dated for three years up until God called him home. He made such an impact on my life I try to find as many ways to honor him. He had always had a shaved head, but his treatments made him bald. He embraced the fact he had no hair.

This dailycreate is of something yellow. The first thing that pops in my head is a duckling. So I started drawing away with my pens and highlighters. I then didn’t like how the background was so white. I used my trusty pixlr website and made the background a yellowish green color to add more yellow. Even though I’m not the best artist, I still think he is kinda cute.

When I went to pimp my flickr up, I found that I had already done most of this stuff. I had forgotten about some of my previous pictures on my flickr and it was nice to go through and reminisce on them. Throughout the week I added more pictures to my best pictures set. I also noticed that they have captions and went through and changed them so it makes the show prettier.

Jon.

Cats and Dogs do not belong together

Converging Window

Ordinary to Interesting Object

Abstract critter

snowman

Other dog steals ball

A dog and a ball

A dog

Spin the bottle

A morning at the River

Stonehenge

My and my Mom at stonehenge

My family at Stonehenge

London Eye

Tower Bridge

Big Ben

Harrods

OSHA Dog

Bandit and Lilo

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Fulvis Whistling Duck

Big Ben

This week really made me love pictures even more than I already do. I am obsessed with pixlr and am slowly learning more about the different tools. Overall, the photoblitz was my favorite assignment. I really liked going out and trying to express what I thought the different themes meant by expressing them with a picture. I did wish I knew how to add effects on my iphone and could enhance the pictures more. Unfortunately I did not find pixlr until after I had done the photoblitz and have no gone back through to enhance the pictures. The visual assignments this week were also very cool. It was fun to change things around and really express things differently. I have also been communicating this week with my group for the radio show. One of the other members posted our assignment. We are planning on doing a family road trip radio show. We want to create a story around a typical goofy family that is bonding, but then of course the car breaks down. I believe we are planning on meeting to really get everything on a roll. I have always thought that it is easiest to meet in person with a group rather than communicate through email. This week I also listened to a bit more of the ds106 radio. I didn’t catch a live show or anything, but just jammed out during homework. I also spent a lot of time going through other people’s posts. I wanted to see what assignments others were doing and if they had any good tips on editing pictures. I saw some really cool pictures, but didn’t really get any more tips than I already had.

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Draw It!

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For my first Visual Assignment for this week, I’ve decided to do Justin Baker’s Draw it. “Take a photograph of something and transform it through GIMP, Photoshop, etc, into a drawing.” I also decided to attempt to also make it a tutorial! (:

My first thought when I saw the criteria for this work was, “I really want to make my “drawing” look like something out of a comic book.”

I started by looking through the photos on my computer and decided which photo would look amazing as a sketch. That’s when I came across this photo of my neighbor Nick! And I knew THIS was the photo I was going to work with! I pulled up the photo with my basic computer editing software which came on the computer when I purchased it, I hit the “draw/sketch” icon and BAM there it is. I also decided to mess with the contrast and color options to make the photo drawing more effective! (: This activity was fun and easy. I just used the basic software from my computer and transformed my photo into a drawing. This assignment was worth two stars (:

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Juxtaposition with feater and wire

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For the Real Life to Cartoon Collage assignment, my brain immediately brought up the words “wire bird.” A couple quick images searches brought me to the two pictures I wanted, and then it was just a matter of slapping them together in GIMP with a slightly opaque eraser tool. Voila! Collage, iconic images, 4 stars to bring me up past the 10 I need for the week (I should have twelve now, actually. What? Overachiever? Nnnooooo, why on Earth would you say that?).

The original images I used for this project was this photo of a wire bird sculpture by Michael Van Hout:

The idea of sculpting avain forms with wire is nothing new, nor is the idea of depicting birds in art. As a species we’re kind of obsessed with them actually. There’s something about the grace and freedom of a bird in flight, the way they perch and move, that has fascinated artists and storytellers since… uh, forever, basically.

Using wires do suggest the image of a bird strikes me as one of the best ways to interpret them. Birds have very distinct lines and contours, but symbolically they are light, more part of the wind than riding it. Creating a wire form conveys all of these things with a great deal of subtlety and grace.

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We the Chickens

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My final assignment from the bank this week was Newspaper Blackout Poetry:

“Grab a marker and today’s morning edition and start blacking out sections to create a new story. It could be a poem, a picture, or a novella, all drawn from the words of the latest news.”

Fredericksburg chickens unanimously passed two ordinances that allow beehives to petition in support of bees in residential neighborhoods.

This is just a little nonsensical story. The original text stuck out to me because the title was about chickens, a front page story about chickens? Did I move to the midwest over night? At first this story was about Fredericksburg residents voting that chicken copes and beehive can be allowed in residential neighborhoods as long as they are properly restrained an protected, but I decided to focus it more on the chickens running a town of bees. I think it turned out pretty well.

I made this story by finding an already silly story in the Star Weekly and blacking out words to make it different.

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Break-up Mix Tape

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I found an assignment in the visual assignment bank called Stories Written In Windows Media Player:

“Write a sentence (preferably somewhat coherent, yet on the nonsensical side), a poem, or a quick story using the titles of songs you have in your Windows Media Player (iTunes may possibly work as well).”

I used Itunes…

My story is about a couple breaking up, because of the gender usage in the songs it’s hard to tell the dynamic, but I’ll leave that to the imagination. The Dumper says “Alright, I’m moving on. I gotta feeling as if she likes me for me, so sorry it’s over even if it breaks your heart little lion man. Thanks for the memories.” Then the Dumpee says “Say anything else, never say never. I’m only me when I’m with you” … and the very insensitive Dumper says “Get over it.”

It’s probably not a good thing but the desperate tone of this song kind of makes me laugh, that may also be because I hear the story being told as fragments of each song, so its a very musical tragedy.

I made this by: creating a playlist in itunes, draging the songs that I wanted into the playlist and then taking a screen shot.

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Pisa

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I decided to try the Optical Illusion visual assignment this week:

“Take a photo that manipulates distance to create an optical illusion.”

My photo is a picture of me and the leaning tower of Pisa! I choose this assignment because I already had the perfect picture from my trip to Italy last spring. It could tell a story about me saving a precious world monument, but really I think there is no saving this one. I read those big white signs you can see in the background next to the tower, and most of the leaning tower of pisa has already been replaced or reinforced to try to keep it from completely falling over. It seems to me like eventually there will be no saving it, there is only so much reinforcing you can do, so I’m glad I got to see it while it’s still intact.

I made this photo by:

Flying to Europe, taking a train to Pisa, Following the crowd from the train station, standing on a post and having my friend take a picture of me!

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Sleepy Kitty

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The first assignment I did was Animated Pet.

“Take a picture of your pet, and make an animated GIF from the photo.”

make animated gifs like this at MakeAGif

I choose this assignment because it seemed like a good warm up for the week, Teddy is my most willing photo subject and I already knew how to make a GIF from a few weeks ago when I made an Uptown Girls GIF. The story is just about my sleepy cat, who apparently can be comfortable in any position. He can fall asleep in a weird pose and then 30 seconds later, he will be jumping off the walls, playing unroll the toilet paper (one of his favorites) and climbing the screen door, I hear this is normal from other kitten owners, but I’m hoping there will be more sleeping and less terrorizing in the future.

I made this GIF the same way I made the one a few weeks ago:

Taking some pics of Ted
Uploading those pics to makeagif.com
reordering the shots
clicking continue
and then grabbing the link