I decided to try a random visual assignment and got The Boone Gorges Parent-Child Headswap. I didn’t have a child handy, but I did have The Tick. This was actually given to me by a child. A friend’s daughter, toddler at the time, walked up and handed it to me, oblivious that I was a fan. I wonder if she’d be impressed that I still have it.

Trying to get this swap to come out well was pretty hopeless. The Tick head was going to be fuzzy no matter what because I had to enlarge it so much. I tried to blur the photo a bit to match but it didn’t help.

The trick here was to copy bits of background and paste it to cover the parts of my head that aren’t covered by The Tick. I think I learned this from the You Suck At Photoshop series.  I did a pretty sloppy job of it though.

That was pretty lame, so I thought I’d try another. I had a picture of myself and the neighbor’s cat. This isn’t going to work too well either because of the cat’s ear, but at least the focus is better. The whiskers will be a problem too.

With both of these I used the Gimp, because Photoshop sucks at being cost-effective for normal people. I used the Polygon Select tool to trace around the heads and copy them onto new layers, then I scaled the layers to sizes that looked about right. The swap of this picture came out like this:

This still looks lame, but at least it has a cat in it. Maybe I could have worked something with the whiskers. I think the big problem is that both of these pictures were pretty lame to start. Maybe the moral of the story is to use better material to get better results.

“Use photo editing software of your choice to splice pairs of pictures into single images.  Play with scale in delightful ways.  See artist Stephen McMennamy’s great collection.”

ds106 Assignments: Combophoto

So this is another step in my photoshop journey. But I didn’t exactly use photoshop. Yes, I returned to my old best friend, google doc. Maybe it is my very limited understanding of Photopea, the software I used in a previous visual assignment, but I needed to do simple things that Google Docs let me do easily. Photopea wouldn’t let me rotate the photo and got mad at the sizes of it all, so I fell back to well-known waters.

I chose an idea based on the fact that I wanted the two things to have a specific point of juncture. So, a tree and a bone.

I found this photo of a tree, I wanted one with a color that was kind of like bone, and this fit.

Then I found this deer bone, also a color that I thought would kind of fit. It was a bonus that the background was blue, not exactly like the sky in the tree photo, but close enough to not be too contrasting.

I used the function on google docs that can put an image behind the text to put the tree behind the bone. With a little movement, I got this.

Then to clean it up, I cut out a swatch of the blue from the background of the bone and added it.

And there is the final version!

I know every photo is a story, and I have no idea what this story is, but I think it is interesting anyway.

Spiders are capable of a great many things. For example, take Misumena, otherwise known as Flower Crab Spider, is an amazing type of spider that is capable of changing its color to match the flower it is hiding in. It is one of the few spiders in the world with this remarkable ability. Below you can see a picture of one of these spiders hiding on a flower.

By using photo editing one can make the crab spider easier to see. Below, the spider, which is now gray, can be seen against the background of the bright orange flower.

This was my first assignment from the assignment bank this week. The prompt was Splash the Color. I choose it because I thought it would be something that would be cool to learn how to do, and as I said in my DreamScape post, I am interested in learning more about photo editing and these assignments are a great excuse to do so. It was very frustrating near the end because there was one button I could not find for a while, which was the add mask layer one. However, in the end, I was quite pleasantly surprised at the result and thought the struggle was worth it.

It was also enjoyable to make because I like spiders and other creatures one can find outdoors. I also think some spiders are unappreciated and that people are often afraid of them, despite the fact that most spiders here in Virginia can’t harm them. I also wanted to share the fact that Flower Crab Spiders can change color because I thought that it was a really cool fact about them.

To accomplish this, I used Adobe Photoshop and copied the image twice to serve as two other layers. I desaturated the second layer and then used color range on the first layer to select some of the shades of orange from the flower. Then I added a color mask and was able to use a pen tool, and using black and white, un-color and color whatever I wanted.

It was worth 3.5 stars.

Sources:

USA Spiders-Misumena – Flower Crab Spider

This source provided me with the information about the Flower Crab Spider I used above.

The Color Splash Effect – How To Make A Photo Black And White Except One Color created by Brendan Williams.

I used this video to learn how to accomplish this feat.

“Use one of your favorite poems as inspiration for a poster. Edit an image or create your own background using any photo editing software, add the poem, and make sure the background exemplifies the poems message. Get creative and have fun!”

https://assignments.ds106.us/assignments/poetry-art/

Alright, please bear in mind my history. Today was the first day that I edited a photo in a software besides google doc image options.

First things first, (i’m the realest), I choose a poem. This was pretty easy. I am the kind of person to have a favorite poem, but a favorite poem that is not by an easily recognizable poet. Missed You. is actually by a student who went to UMW. I saw this poem in the aubade when I toured here and never forgot it. So we got the poem.

Now, we need some kind of poster idea. When I read this poem the thing that sticks out is the candle and the fact that they are in darkness. I originally wanted to play around with the darkness and found/edited this background.

Then I wanted to add the candle image.

So I found this photo of dripping candles.

This is where the photo editing software came in. I used Photopea, which is free by the way, and it was honestly a little overwhelming at first, but I just played around. I tried to make both the dark weave background and the candles work together, but it just wasn’t really working, so I scraped the dark background and went with just the candles.

I cut out around them so that it looked like this. Yes, I kept the little dots around them, that was on purpose because I thought that it looked cool.

I then formatted the words a little so that they fit around the parts of the photo I left.

Now I had this. I thought I was done, but as I put this photo at the top of the blog, I realized that the bottom part was really empty. So I went back and did some simple Google Doc image re-arranging and got this.

As I was writing this, I thought about changing the background color. I present this alternate version with a black background.

I like this version better so I am officially changing it. This is the final version.

Do I love the finished product? Not exactly. Am I proud of it? Yes. Definitely. I did something new and accomplished a not-half-bad end goal. From here, there is nowhere to go but up. And I can take solace in that fact.

Here is my school backpack and the essentials that I keep inside of it. First thing is my laptop. I use this to do all of my work, especially for this class. I also have my AirPods with me. Listening to music while working really helps me to focus. I also always have my planner with me to keep track of my daily to-do lists. I also always have a book with me, either if it’s reading for pleasure or for a class. This week I am reading “One of Us is Lying” by Karen M. McManus. I also never leave my house without a water bottle. This is one of my favorites that I bought at the L. L. Bean store in Freeport, Maine. And of course, I always have my phone with me in my bag, but in this photo I am using it to take the picture!

This is one of my most favorite phots that I have taken. I snapped it while walking on Sunken Road one morning on the way to class. The rain, the trees, the fall vibes, to me it’s perfect.

I never knew that there was such a thing where you could convert a picture into a sketch. I love the “By Any Sketch of the Imagination” DS106 assignment because it made me think more deeply about what sketches are and their importance. The drawing is the base of an entire art piece, and without it, there would not be much room for error and creativity to happen. The photograph that I took above was a beautiful picture of the sky when I was on a plane coming home from Florida, and seeing it in sketch form was super cool because it gave me an idea of what it would look like if someone were to draw