For this visual assignment, I did another “try random one” and came across the “Street View Story” assignment. Being an English major, I was more than excited to find an assignment that incorporates visual as well as textual elements. The photo is of Ponte Cavour, Rome, Lazio, Italy. Here is the little story I came up with for this picture:

The first time I lost her was because of the lights. I was seven and she was four, and we lived in Rome. First, we went to the river, even though we weren’t allowed. We loved the water. Lily liked to watch her reflection; she thought of it as a friend who she always wanted to meet, hiding down there below the surface. We decided to play hide-and-seek by the bridge. It was our favourite game. But Lily was too good at hiding. It was her turn to hide, and I failed to find her. I kept looking until it got dark, but I had to go home and tell my parents I had lost Lily. Mother wailed when I said it, but Father grabbed my arm, and we ran back to the fields to find her. We brought lanterns and searched for hours, hoping for a glimpse of her thick brown hair, her enormous blue eyes. We didn’t find her until she popped out of the water; that’s how good she was at hide-and-seek.

Hope you enjoyed my story!

So, I was kinda getting bored of the visual assignments that were listed, so I clicked on the “try random one” button to find something new that no one else was really doing. I came across this assignment called “Warhol Something” and decided to give it a shot. At first, I was trying to use GIMP, but I couldn’t find a filter that matched and was getting impatient, so I googled “Pop Art Editor.” One of the first Google results was a site called PicMonkey. On here, I took a random picture on Photo Booth, uploaded it, used the “Warhol” effect (how fortunate for me!), changed the colours, and I’m done! Too bad my picture isn’t as cool as Andy’s are, but hey, I’m not really an artsy-fartsy kind of person.

This is going to be a 2-in-1 blog post! One of the assignments this week was to embed a flickr set into a post and write about why we chose those photos and what story they’re trying to tell. the other assignment I chose was to create a series of photos that represent a milestone [...]

For this assignment, I found an app for my iPhone called iSplash (which is free, yay!) that allowed me to edit my pictures and make certain parts black and white, or coloured. It was really hard to do considering I had to edit the photo using a touchscreen rather than with a mouse on a computer; however, I think it still turned out really well! I took this photo in December when there were a ton of Christmas lights and Christmas trees everywhere (I wish they kept them out the whole year….) I guess this picture really shows my opinion about Christmas lights: that they brighten up even the darkest and gloomiest winter nights (:

This picture is what I created for the “An Album Cover” assignment. After seeing Kaitlyn’s submission for this assignment, I decided to attempt this one too!

The directions are super simple. First, you click here, which directs you to a wiki article. The title of the article is your band name. I got this:

Pretty cool name, right?

Next, you click here, which directs you to a site with quotes. The last 4-5 words of the quote on the page is the album’s title. I got this:

Finally, you click here, and pick the third picture, which is the picture of your band’s album. Here, I got this:

So, once I got everything, I went on Pixlr.com again and chose the advanced editor. There, I chose a cool looking filter, added in my texts, changed the colours, and BAM! My first album (cover!) Now, I just need a guitarist, bass player, drummer, vocalist, some songs, and we’re good.

For this assignment, I decided to use this photo from Sara’s flickr set. I saved this photo and uploaded it onto Pixlr.com, a website Michael Branson-Smith talked about during this week’s ds106 show. On Pixlr, I used the text tool to add in the text, chose my font (an elegant cursive font), sized it, moved it, and changed the colour to black so it would stand out against the red fire. Then, TA-DA, all done! It was surprisingly easy to do, considering Michael made it seem super hard (but then again, I didn’t need to get rid of any text in the original image…)

But yeah! That’s my Valentine’s day card, even though it’s not super romantic at all (but pretty funny!) Let me know what you guys think (: