Hi guys!  So I decided to do the “Common everyday object” assignment.  I took a few photos of things around the office and around school.  What I finally decided to do was to edit a photo of one of the most bittersweet moments in my college path thus far.  So last semester, my physics friends and I had to take Physics Advanced Lab, which was a gruelingly intense laboratory course that saw many of us set up shop in the physics department computer lab on the 4th floor of Jepson.  Towards the end of the semester, as we were all rushing to get lab reports finished and turned in, many of us began spending more and more hours in that computer lab.  One of my friends turned 21 sitting right there in that lab.  We celebrated for approximately 30 seconds, then promptly got back to lab reports.  This photo is a shot of what my workstation looked like sometime in the middle of a 48 hour no-sleep-lab-bender (yep, you read that right.  48 hours straight without sleep).  You can see the multiple flavors of Monster Energy drinks behind my terminal, and the multiple computers I was using.  Just out of the frame was the pizza we had delivered.  And underneath that was the pizza box from the night before.

As far as the creation here goes, I decided to play around with the saturation and the colors a little bit in iPhoto.  I finally decided on this combination which gives it a bit of an antique kinda faded photo look.

4 Lines 5 Dots 1 Curve 4 stars

You had to be very creative to do this assignment. It was difficult to figure out what to do, but once I thought of something, it was easy. I decided to create a compass. It’s a little abstract so use your imagination! I used paint to create this image because it had the tools for drawing circles, lines, and curves.

Link: http://assignments.ds106.us/assignments/optical-illusion/

Alright, this one was in a rush, but here is me holding a calender. The lightning unfortunately is not too good (the photo was taken at 9:16pm. I chose the calender because it was one of the more interesting items to do this with in my room.

Pretty much the only things I used were a room light and a small lamp in the corner. My camera ended up switching to Twilight a couple of times before it stopped so that is why the color appears slightly washed out.

I wish I could say there was a ton of thought behind it, but it was just pretty much happened randomly. Wish I had more light, but it was at night time.

Let me know what you think!

For my last visual assignment of the week, I decided to try out this one that limits our usage to only a few basic shapes: 4 lines, 5 dots, and one curve. I decide to do an artistic rendition of a space view of our home. The 5 dots make up the Earth, the Sun, the Moon, the comet, and the probe. The 4 lines make up the antenna of the probe, and the curve makes up the comet tail. It was fun being limited in terms of what shapes I could use and thinking up what I would have to add into the picture to incorporate everything. Since I was not limited in terms of color, I added a gradient effect to the moon to give a sense of lighting, colored in some of the landmass of Earth, and added a lens flare filter over the Sun. The entire picture was done in GIMP utilizing the simple ellipse, paint fill, and brush tools for color.

 

Difficulty Rating: 4 stars

Lucius Annaeus Seneca once said, “One of the most beautiful qualities of true friendship is to understand and to be understood.” So for this assignment, I had to uncrop a road sign and make a picture out of it. This is what I did.

I just downloaded a JPEG of this road sign and Paint is where I used to do this assignment. The actually road sign is on the left and the right is the one I made. I just got the color to be in the background on the right so I just draw some houses with the parents walking on the sidewalk coming back home from outside with their three kids waiting for them. I combined the two pictures together and it is what it is above. I already did this as one of my daily create assignment during week 5.

Finally I see the home stretch! My last attempt at successfully completing a 12 star requirement and I finish with this 2 1/2 star beauty! With having to utilize the last 3 containers that I had drunk from throughout the day, this particular day actually spoke volumes to how my week was finishing out. This day was havoc with attempting to throw the party of the year for my soon to b e 12-year-old! No breakfast aside from apple juice, a stiff drink to decompress from all that was demanded of me with fulfilling lifetime memories for the baby of my nest, and a cup of coffee was well needed to recover from some high-proof rum! Ouch!

A third of the way done with visual assignments, this time I capitulated on a 2 star execution. “Larger than Life” required that I create an image of something making it appear larger than life; I decided to go with a dime keeping with the theme of The Wire. This would represent a detectives most desired and valued weapon.

For the next visual assignment I reached even higher for the sky with a 4 star challenge. “Time of Day” consisted of taking several pics of an image throughout different times of the day. I captured the view from my a bedroom entry door while watching my daughter board the school bus as it was the earliest part of the day in which I look outdoors. Again later in the morning I took another pic as well as at noon. The final pic I took in the evening just as my day comes to an end. The pics tell a story of how our day transitions and it is a beautiful sight to pause time and just be in the moment.

With a requirement of 12 stars for completing visual assignments, I reached for the high stars starting with A-Z Photo Collage. I wanted to approach this assignment from a perspective no one had done so I decided to do sea life. After many attempts utilizing Photoshop I decided to use a more simplistic method, so I used Powerpoint to collage my pics of various sea life from A-Z!