For this assignment, I wanted to use some pictures I already had. I started going through the many vacation pictures we have. I was looking for photos that offered some “space”over which to layer other images. I took a photo from our trip to England of the Roman Baths in Bath, England and combined it with a picture of my husband rowing a boat which is actually from another trip, this time to France (where else to row a boat but France, right? Très romantique!)

I chose the rowboat image because he would still be in a body of water, just one that is smaller than a neighborhood swimming pool. I added the parrot because it seemed having a bird on your shoulder would be something you could do on a boat (I guess I was thinking pirate…). The pirate is NOT from a past vacation, but rather a google image search of “parrot on shoulder”. I knew I needed a parrot on a left shoulder and was able to find one.   Here are the three unadulterated images:

For this, I stuck with Pixlr and used the layering and eraser tool quite a bit. I used the baths as my background layer.

Then I selected “open image as layer” for the picture of my husband and layered it over the background.

I then employed the eraser function and made my brush REALLY big to erase the entire rowboat picture except for my hubby.

Next, the parrot. I initially slapped that photo on top, unedited, but it was too messy to erase. So I saved it as an image, then used the crop and eraser tools to get the image down to just the parrot with a white background.

From there, I repeated the “open image as layer”, placed the parrot on hubby’s shoulder and erased the parrot background.

I’m sure there is some kind of cut tool that would have let me cut away swaths of layer instead of erase, but I was on a roll with the eraser from my first assignment and figured if it’s working for now, why stop? Next time I work with layers like this, I’ll do my research to do it the “right” way if there is one.

As for the result?  I’d say this is some pretty cheesy photo editing.  As a positive, I did become much more comfortable with Pixlr, get more practice with layers and got to put my imagination (and old vacation pics) to good use in this assignment.  The size of both the parrot and my husband is so large as to make them almost monster-like in their proportions to the bath and the other people in the shot.  I also gave both my husband and the parrot a bit of a haircut in the process of layering them in.  I would probably look into resizing the images in the top two layers to make them more proportional.

Because I like to live dangerously, I chose the very first assignment at the top of the list: Splash the Color.  I don’t know if there was an “inspiration” for this per se–my thinking was more more “how am I going to get this done?”  I remembered the name Pixlr from the opening video for this week, so off I went to their page. I also reviewed the pages of others who had done this assignment.  I wanted to use a photo I already had–I was a bit tired of skulking around my house and yard for subjects.  I also wanted to use a photo that had fairly defined shapes since I was anticipating it would be difficult to color something intricate.  So I ended up with my recent masterpiece “Apple on Rug”.  I got very lucky with this assignment, because under one of the first help topics on Pixlr’s help page was “Selective Coloring”.  Jackpot!  I simply followed the tutorial and voila.  The steps involve creating a duplicate layer, desaturating the color out of the top layer, and then “erasing” the top layer so the color of the apple shines through.  The video we watched on layers earlier in the week definitely helped here as I immediately understood what the tutorial was asking me to do.

It was a bit tedious as the eraser size was very small and it wasn’t until I was finished that I saw I could change the eraser size:

I had been using “50″ and it was slow going.   So I tried it again with a larger brush size and it look me about 3 minutes:

Sherlock Holmes Pub, Westminster London