The next assignment I did was the A-Z photo collage.  This assignment was worth three stars (which put my total count up to seven at this point).

The first part of this assignment was to pick a theme.  I decided to go with Disney characters for my theme.  At first I thought this was going to be fairly easy but I ended up realizing that finding an X Disney character was not just hard but impossible.  Other than that I ended up finding a character for each letter and inserting them into my collage.  I used picmonkey to make my collage.   I found it to be fairly simple and easy to customize.

So with out further adieu here is my Disney Characters A-Z:

• A- Aurora from Sleeping Beauty
• B- Belle from Beauty and the Beast
• C- Cinderella from Cinderella
• D- Dumbo from Dumbo 
• E- Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh
• F- Fa Mulan from Mulan
• G- Giselle from Enchanted
• H- Hercules from Hercules
• I- Iago from Aladdin
• J- Jasmine from Aladdin
• K- Kiara from Lion King 2
• L- Little Mermaid from Little Mermaid
• M- Merida from Brave
• N- Nemo from Finding Nemo
• O- Oliver from Oliver and Company
• P- Pocahontas from Pocahontas
• Q- Queen of Hearts from Alice in Wonderland
• R- Rapunzel from Tangled
• S- Snow White from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs 
• T- Tiana from Princess and the Frog
• U- Ursula from Little Mermaid
• V- Vanellope von Schweetz from Wreck-It Ralph
• W- Woody from Toy Story
• Y- Yao from Mulan
• Z- Zeus from Hercules

The next visual assignment that I choose this week was Pick A Bad Photo, Apply A Vintage Effect And Write Something In Helvetica which was worth two stars.

I choose a picture that I had taken of a play set last weekend when I was at the beach.  I edited it a little bit in picmonkey to give it more of a vintage feel.  I then added a quote by Walt Disney (because he’s obviously one of my favorite people ever, which I’m sure you’ve noticed if you’ve read more than two of my posts).

Here is my final results!

Only 6 more stars to go!!

This week for ds106 we had to do ten stars worth of visual assignments.  I decided to do cropped signs for two of my ten stars.

In this assignment you had to “change, alter, enhance the meaning of a sign by cropping out parts of it.”  I wasn’t totally sure what type I was going to use until I can across this sign  from Magic Kingdom in Disney World.  

Pretty uplifting right? Upon entering you get to leave the world of today and experience yesterday, tomorrow and the future.  And who wouldn’t want to do that?

After cropping the sign it had a bit of a different message though.

So instead of sounding uplifting the sign sounds a little bit like you are going to die.  Who would have thought you’d be able to come across something this morbid at Disney?

I had the most fun this week with the “Love: In Three Frames” assignment and knew almost immediately what to make mine about.  As my URL indicates, I’m really a dog person. Like…REALLY really.  Unfortunately, my girlfriend is very much a cat person, and the place we live is too small to have any dogs in it.  The following three frames more or less sum up our entire relationship.

For this one, I just had to open up the three images, which I already had on my computer (one of these from a different assignment!) and come up with the captions.  I actually used Microsoft Paint for this one, which is pretty archaic but the easiest for just moving some images around.  The only problem I ran into was that I accidentally made a typo and Paint doesn’t allow you to go back to a textbox once you click away from it, so I had to just move a different textbox over the original.

This was my favorite assignment from the bank though since it was the most personal to me!

That’s not true.

I haven’t been.

But I DID this week! The color popping assignment was a lot of fun. I’ll admit I got a little bit of a hand cramp erasing the black and white image to reveal the colored layer.  Did anyone else find a less complicated way of popping the color than putting a black and white copy of the image over the original and erasing the top layer over the part you wanted? It worked – it was just a bit tiresome.

Here’s what I came up with!

This picture is from PRISM Prom this past fall, where the theme was “Pretty in Pink.”   The balloons and pom-poms really stood out in this picture so I decided to pop the pink.  I really like how it turned out.  I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to do it this way though because the pinks are different shades.

Like I said, it was a pretty simple process.  Open the image in GIMP, open another copy of it and paste it over the original after converting it to black and white.  After that, you can choose the eraser option (on transparent setting) and erase away the black and white part over where your color is. Ta-da!

I own one of the chubbiest cats ever and it’s the perfect look for him, so when I saw this assignment in the assignment bank, I knew I had to try it.  When I realized I’m close friends with the person who created the assignment, it just solidified my decision.  I didn’t have a whole lot of luck making the picture blend in, unfortunately, but I had a lot of fun finding a painting to use and a cat to insert into it.

This portrait is titled “Annunciation” and is by Leonardo da Vinci (although I cut it in half).  This cat is just a cat.  I actually used Adobe Photoshop’s online editor, which I know now was a mistake.  I’ve been having much better luck with GIMP’s photo editing tools.  I cut the cat out of its own picture,  and pasted it onto the painting by da Vinci.  I adjusted the filter to try to make the cat fit in more with the  reds and browns in the image, but the closest I could get was that funky purple-ish color.   The next step was to try softening the image, hoping that it would make the picture of the cat less realistic.  The final touch was attempting to burn the edges of the cat in an effort to do the same thing, but it still didn’t come out looking how I had wanted it too.  I feel REALLY silly but when I created this I didn’t realize GIMP had photo editing options, so I didn’t think to use it.  Big mistake.

That being said, the cat does make this painting look funnier and I’m a fan of the assignment!