The go vote assignment was a simple 1 star assignment from the visual assignment bank. I went to the Library of Congree website and got the picture from there.

Many people have fought for the right to vote, especially for women. I think this poster speaks wonders! I am an aspiring teacher and I think I would use this in my future classroom when teaching my students about voting and civic responsibilities. I think this would be a great way for students to express themselves and show what they know. All thanks to DS 106! :)

When I saw the splash of color assignment, I knew that I had to do it!! I actually saw some pictures online one time that had a splash of color in a black and white picture and LOVED them. It was before my DS days so I didn’t understand how they did it. Well one day, I will be as good as those people.

I downloaded the Color Effects app on my iPhone. This made doing this particular assignment very fun and easy to do. The only annoying part is that I had to be really careful not to go outside of the lines because you color with your finger. This was my first picture:

This was when the fire alarm went off during my Tuesday night class and the firemen came. It was all I could do not to take pictures for this class – I knew I would catch something good. I wasn’t happy with the splash on this picture because it looks weird. So I kept doing them:

This picture {of my boyfriend’s nephew} is taken from above – I was trying to experiment with the perspective of the picture. I chose to splash his eyes because he has the most beautiful color blue eyes ever! Isn’t he just the cutest???

I think everyone knows why I chose to splash these colors — THE RAVENS won the Superbowl!!!! Wahoo! I was rooting for them because I wanted Michael Oher to win a Superbowl!

I loved doing this assignment and it was pretty easy to do. Now, I find myself looking at things like “what could I color splash with this?” :) You could say DS has officially changed my life!!

To continue on my Visual Assignment quest, I did a one star worthy assignment today from the ds106 Assignment Bank.  I randomly chose the assignment, Winterize It!, which requires the winterizing of a photo from the summer.

I wanted to make it very realistic, so I googled how to add snow to a photo.  A set of directions popped up to use GIMP, which I already had, so I decided to follow those.  Unfortunately, after about 30 minutes of creating layers and screening them over the original photo, the end result wasn’t what I wanted, so I scratched all that.

Instead, I  opened the photo in Picasa which then lead me to open it in Picnik.  Picnik allowed me to add Santa hats to each of the people in the photo.  Here’s the original photo:

And this is what it looked like after I added the Santa hats:

To find a much easier way of adding snow, I googled adding snow to a photo again, and looked down further.  I stumbled upon a website, Lunapic, that does it for you once you upload your photo.  After that, I saved it to my computer and uploaded it to Flickr.

Although it turned out much faker than I originally wanted, it gets the point across and after failing in GIMP, I just wanted it to be done!

For this assignment we had to turn a photograph into a sketch.  Here’s what I ended up with.

I had an app on my phone called Picture Effects Magic that has various filters to change the picture.  I used the lighter picture again because it was an interesting photo.  Then I loaded it into flickr from my phone and that was it.  Then I decided I wanted to add more and did all of these…

This was a tough assignment.  We were supposed to edit a picture to change the mood of the photo.  Here’s my attempt.

The one on the right was the before picture.  To change the photo, I messed around with the contrast, hue, etc.  I’m not really sure how I did it honestly, I just played around.  I think the final photo ended up looking old and worn, which definitely changes the feel of the photo.

So this assignment was to take 3 pieces–a quote, a picture, and a name–and mix them all together.  You can read more about it here.

This was my final product.  I couldn’t decide what to do for a while and ended up deciding on a Zoolander quote because it’s my favorite movie and who doesn’t love a good movie quote?  Then I narrowed that down to “I’m not an ambi-turner” because it’s one of the most memorable of the movie.  Then, for a while, I tried to think of another movie similar to Zoolander.  There aren’t any.  I thought another Ben Stiller movie would be just fine and then the whole thing ended up being a big Ben Stiller mashup.

As for putting the whole thing together, I used Gimp.  I googled White Goodman for the picture.  I chose this one because it had lots of space to put words on it.  Then I used the text editor and added in the quotes, finally picking Tony Perkis, the counselor from Heavy Weights, as the quoted character.  The rest is history.

Another really fun 2 star assignment- Splash the color! I’ve always wondering who once does this. Apparently you can do it in Photoshop, but I don’t have that on my computer. I looked under the “tutorial” section and noticed that former ds106er Anapaula downloaded iSplash Free on her Iphone to complete this assignment. So I did the same.

After downloading it, I started playing around with the program. It’s simple to use. My only “complaint” is that you have to use your finger on the phone screen (obvisiously) and so if you want to do small detailed pictures you most likely will “color outside the lines” and it’s really difficult to make it “perfect”. I’m sure if you used Photoshop, it’s less of a problem.

So I got so into it that I completely zoned out in the library (embarrassing!) I was listening to Pandora and just played around with pictures for a good 20 minutes! So I have several examples. A few I had some trouble with the “coloring outside the lines”, but I think overall they turned out very well for using a phone app!

I have the cutest story about this older (both in their 90s) couple. Married for 72 years and have never had a cross word with one another (according to her). She has alzheimer’s, he does not. Yet, he moved into the memory care unit when she did so they could stay together. That is true and unconditional love! They are both the sweetest! They live in the same unit as my grandmother, that’s how I know them!

This is at a Target in Lancaster, PA. It just made me laugh and smile! I love that the Amish go to Target!

Of course Maggie had to make an appearance!

I made ornaments for my friends as part of their Christmas gifts!

This one was cool.  I ended up just stumbling across this assignment even though it was one of the suggested ones for the week.

Really not that hard to do.  Took me a little time to think of something to take a picture of and then thinking of a good background.  I ended up picking the lighter because it was bright and would really jump out against a background.  Then I decided on the side of my front porch because I thought it was an interesting background because there was a lot going on.  The angle of the shot took me a while to figure out because I wanted to get as little of the wall and as much of the background as I could.  Getting the size of the lighter was important too.

After all that, I loaded it into Gimp into two different frames.  I made the one frame black and white with the color adjustments and the other one I used to cut out the orange color of the lighter.  After cutting the orange out, I copied that into another picture so I could remove the BIC label for no apparent reason.  I just wanted to.  Then I copied everything I had left, and pasted it into the black and white frame, moving it around so it fit right on the image.  And that was it.

Vday caption assignment, a photo by klasalata on Flickr.

The timing is just perfect for this Valentine’s Day caption challenge assignment. First of all, it’s only Tuesday and I already love visual week. Second of all, I love Valentine’s Day! I started this assignment from downloading my valentine card from this Flickr set. It was hard to only pick one, but somehow I came to this one and knew exactly what I was going to do. I added the caption and uploaded it straight to WordPress because I linked my Flickr and WordPress together.

Happy Valentine’s Day my fellow DS 106ers! {I hope you don’t have a Valentine like this guy in your life!}