For my final visual assignment, I Forrest Gumped myself into a historical scene. The comedian Norm MacDonald died recently, and one of his most famous comedic legacies was endlessly mocking OJ Simpson and his infamous murder trial while on SNL. As a result, the first historical scene that popped into my mind was OJ Simpson’s murder trial (especially since it occurred after the release of Forrest Gump yet is now an event that is far enough back in time to be considered history now).

Here was the photo I chose:

For this, I once again used Photoshop. I decided instead of putting my entire body into the photo, I would simply use my head to replace the head of the man standing in the foreground (arms crossed). I had one of my roommates take a picture of me, tilting my head and matching my eye line with the man in the picture. Next, I imported the original photo and the picture of me into Photoshop. I cropped my head out of the photo and then sized it and rotated it slightly to make it match the body. Finally, I softened the picture of my head to mimic the fact that the man in the picture is out of focus.

And voilà!

by Thomas Pulsifer

For my second task from the assignment bank this week, I’ve chosen Chloe Smolarski’s 4-star prompt to combine at least two images and create a shocking message. All it took was a single glance at the face mask in front of me to know what I wanted my piece to be about: Monkeys (Yes, my mask has monkeys on it). Monkeys are easily my favorite animal, and it’s fairly well known that their habitats are being decimated by plantations, manmade forest fires, and climate change. Despite the common awareness of this issue, very little is being done about it. It’s unlikely my poster here will accomplish anything in the grand scheme of things, but if it makes even one person consider what they can do to help, then it’s all worth it.

Seeing as the photo used to create this poster is a pre-existing one, there wasn’t exactly much I could in terms of applying my newly-gained photography knowledge. However, one thing I did try to adhere to was ensuring the foreground and background were balanced. The monkey was placed in the foreground because the background was already littered with details like trees, smoke, and clouds. Having the monkey sit on the ground closer to the viewpoint allows for the foreground and background to compliment each other better. Beyond that, I also worked with some lighting to make sure the monkey blended well with the environment. Using photoshop is always fun, and I’m excited to do some more work with it to earn the rest of the stars I need for this week.

For this Visual Assignment, I was given the task to name this flower. After some deliberation, I have decided to call this flower Aurelia due to the flowers coloring. Aurelia means golden, which is why I think the name is fitting for this flower.

My freshman year of UMW I was in design principals (Arts105) and we did a self portrait project where we took a black and white photo of ourselves and then turned it into a piece using two colors on the color wheel in different tones. I chose an image with high contrast and turned it into this painting:

I really liked this piece because I thought It told a good story. It exemplifies how America sees, and how it treats people of color. But I had a different image that I wanted to use and never got the chance ( I can’t remember if it was because of the violent nature of the picture of if the contrast wasn’t high enough). Sadly I lost that picture because I also destroyed my phone freshman year ( by dropping off the balcony of the UC).

I decided to recreate that image for this project because I thought it was a very good concept, and I would like to elaborate on it further when I have more time and can really go in depth on the piece. Trigger warning Violence: the Piece depicts me, apparently deceased or unconscious with a saw placed firmly on my neck, in the action of decapitating me. I thought the piece would have a lot of deeper meaning, but I’ll elaborate on that more when I work on that piece.

I never had the chance to go to a summer camp as a kid. My parents worked pretty hard to shelter us from the dangers of the outside world. Now that I’m an adult myself I can understand that they were concerned for my safety and well being, especially being a Black kid with all the terrible things you hear about happening to other children of color. With all that being said, I would have really enjoyed going to a music and arts class when I was young so I could hone my skills and dive deeper into my interests, since I only really got the opportunity to explore these interests seriously in my last few years of high school. This is the poster I made for the imaginary music and arts camp that I went to when I was a kid

I learned a lot while making this poster, Such as the fact that colors look different on the texture of skin than they do on matte, or the fact that when you flip and image the image will not nessacarilly be symmetrical and even with the original image, which is annoying, but I still enjoyed making this poster.

For this assignment I Wanted to use the Poem Parody I wrote last week as inspiration for the art I made this week. Really I just took an image of some lemon ricotta pancakes I made, then blurred the image behind my poem, and this is the finished result:

This assignment was really light and enjoyable, much like the pancakes, and I got a laugh out of revisiting this post so all in all I liked this one, I would definitely revisit this assignment.

For this visual assignment, I chose to give the world a Graphic Gift (three and a half stars). This prompt was about taking a vintage advertisement and extracting the product to create an old-school kind of clip art. I really enjoyed the concept and aesthetic of this assignment, so I decided I would give it a shot.

Here was the original ad:

For this project, I used Photoshop. First, I cropped the canvas so that it was only focused on the Jim Beam bottle. Next, I bumped up the resolution of the selection so that it would come out at an even higher quality (being relatively small in size within the ad). Finally, I used the quick selection tool and selected the bottle. After some cleaning up, I had it extracted from the image. I exported it as a .png, to preserve the transparency, and I ended up with this:

For this visual assignment, I created a color splash (three and a half stars). Essentially, the prompt instructed to isolate a color in an otherwise black and white photo. After much scrolling through my phone’s camera roll, I finally found a picture I thought would work well, from a strange figure I saw in a park over the summer.

For this assignment, I used Photoshop. First, I imported the photo. Then, I duplicated the layer and desaturated the original layer (Shift+Command+U). Then I used the lasso tool to outline the pink figure and inverted my selection so that it was selected everything but the figure. Finally, I erased the rest of the selected top layer, leaving only the figure in color.

Here’s the final result:

For this visual assignment, I chose to make a silly movie poster (three and a half stars). One of my favorite movies of all time is Goodfellas, and the silliest thing that popped into my mind was the classic Groucho Marx glasses, especially when inserted atop unsuspecting victims. Thus, the pairing was born.

This was a fairly easy process. Perhaps the most difficult first step was finding a high-resolution version of the Goodfellas movie poster. Even when you filter your search results to get the highest quality, the results are not great. In the end, I had to go to the Amazon page for the actual movie poster and save the larger image file available directly from the site.

Once I had that, I grabbed a standard product image for some Groucho Marx glasses, and then it was onto Photoshop! First, I imported the poster into Photoshop. Then, I took the glasses and cut it out so that it was transparent and could be placed over the faces. For DeNiro, I placed the glasses straight on top as is, but for Pesci and Liotta I had to do a big of image morphing so they appeared to be slightly turned.

Here was the final result:

Brings new meaning to Pesci’s remark, “Whaddya mean I’m funny?”

For this visual assignment, I did Glitch Art (three stars). I’ve had some minor previous experience with this genre of digital art, so I partially chose this assignment because I already knew what my method for glitching up my photos would be. I also decided I would take photos from my past that captured memories and experiences from versions of myself that I no longer relate to. Thus, the glitch effect would become an embodiment of my own memory and how remembering past events is not always a pleasant experience.

The programs I used for this glitch art were Photoshop and Audacity. First, I opened my photos in Photoshop and saved them as .tif files that Audacity could read. Next, I imported the .tif files as raw data into Audacity so that I could edit the image data as though it were audio data. Then, it was simply a matter of experimenting with different effects to change the shape of the data. Some of the effects I used included reverb, phaser, distortion, echo, reverse, invert, and so on. Once I was done manipulating the files, I exported them as .pngs and appreciated my work.

Here is the first photo, in its original state:

And here it is as glitch art:

Here’s the next photo, unadulterated:

And here’s the glitched-out version: