link: http://assignments.ds106.us/assignments/poetry-art/
3 stars
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link: http://assignments.ds106.us/assignments/poetry-art/
3 stars
For this assignment (worth three stars), I had to create a poster for a favorite poem of mine. I chose “The Tyger” by William Blake. To do this, I used Photoshop, adding color to a public domain image of a tiger standing on a cliff. I then put a gradient in the background to represent a red sunset. Finally, I inserted the poem in a top layer.
This background fits perfectly with The Road Not Taken because the poem is about taken a road that most people would not. When I saw this picture I thought it fit because I could imagine a creepy gas station attendant back down the road a little bit telling every passer which road is easier or safer to go down. The decision one would have to make is if they should take the road less traveled or the road the gas station attendant said not to go down.
This is the Poetry Art assignment calling for a visual landscape to be applied to the text of a poem to better explain its meaning. It’s a three point assignment.
I’ve been reading Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Nature as of late, so I decided to pull a quote from there as my de facto “poem.” This is mainly because I had this image in my head to begin with and I was struggling with creating something worthwhile for another poem. Considering the emphasis here is on visuals, not the poem itself, I hope this is not a problem
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I’m a softy for the American romantics, so naturally Emerson’s flowery perusings are my cup of tea. In Nature, he writes “To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not see the sun. At least they have a very superficial seeing (25). Immediately after reading this passage and my selected passage, I mentally conjured an image of a child stunned and amazed at sunlight while an old man barely notices. I played around with the image a bit and came up with this admittedly somewhat creepy-looking collage.
I absolutely love how the light shines straight through the forehead of the child, but I fought GIMP left and right trying to crop everything around him while keeping the light effects. It was a pain, and it’s still very noticeable. Alas, playing around with color thresholds, blendings, and gradients still left me with some interesting visuals. I particularly love the tired, old eyes representing Emerson’s notion that adults fail to see the true beauty of nature as children do. It really fits beautifully.
I picked the dimensions for the image as I did in the hopes that I could make this a wallpaper for my phone, but initial test-runs have not been flattering. Most people are creeped out by the boy’s face. Oh well! I like it.
So for my poetry art I decided to dedicate my poster to the development of my noir character. I chose a poem that would fit him as a character as well as his timeline. The poem is “Stopping by Woods on a Snowing Evening” by Robert Frost. The poem speaks of a farmhouse in the winter and promises the author knows he has to keep. My idea is that the poem would relate to my noir character, Jack, on a personal level, reminding him of his own childhood. The poster is supposed to reflect the early 1920’s as well though I am sure it could use work.
When scrolling through the assignment bank this week, I didn’t have to look far in order to find one that piqued my interests. I’ve mentioned before that I’ve had to read a lot of children’s books, being a father. So I immediately thought of those books, and how my child loves to point out the pictures, almost entirely ignoring the accompanying story or poetry. So, and I thought this would be a great assignment!
I needed to get a bit more acquainted with GIMP, so I decided to visit the Digital Knowledge Center to learn a bit more. I had attempted to try GIMP a few years ago, but failed miserably, so it left a bad taste in my mouth. I had glanced over a few more assignments, and noticed there were some assignments about highlighting certain colors in a photograph while greyscaling the rest, so I focused on that during my meeting, thinking focusing on a more advanced technique would teach me basics as I worked. The meeting was a great success. I’ve become so acquainted to modern paid-for applications (eg Photoshop) would automatically determine what the user was trying to accomplish, and adjust itself accordingly, so GIMP felt very gritty to me (modular may be a bit more appropriate of a term here, actually). After a while, I became much more confident in my abilities to accomplish basic tasks, so I decided the Poetry Art assignment , worth 3 stars, would be a great way for me to try out my new skills.
I decided I wanted to do Carolyn Forché’s “The Lightkeeper” because I’ve found I have a certain fondness for her work, as well as the concept of illumination through literature.
I did a quick search for lighthouse stencils, and uploaded the image into GIMP, and began my work. The image I used was copyrighted, so I included the copyright in the footer of the image, although it is aesthetically unappealing, I’d rather give attribution than face whatever the consequences may be.
It ended up being a relatively simple layering process. I used the lighthouse stencil I found as the background, and added 3 layers of text, one for the title of the poem, one for the poem itself, and one for the author’s name.
I had thought it was a bit tedious having to switch from the Text tool to the move tool just to move my text boxes (I blame Microsoft Word), but that was really my only issue. My text didn’t fit inside the image at first, so I decided to scale the image up 300%, which I knew would affect the resolution, but it was a stencil, so I really didn’t think it would detract from the project as a whole, so I went ahead with it.
Then, I discovered why I couldn’t move the text boxes! I could still alter the text without having to do any kind of double-clicking business like in Microsoft Word, so I started to like GIMP’s design a bit more; demonstrating the modularity of it’s source code. It’s open-source, and free, so, for the unknowing, that means there can be any number of people working on it as a single project, with work often divvied up by function to allow for what could be considered “plug-and-play” code structure.
Alas, I had my stencil layer, and three layers of text, formatted neatly. I was done! So, here I present to you, my finished project, which I’ve hosted on my Flickr profile:
I really like how pictures can influence what words mean to a person. One of the visual assignments that I did was Poetry Art worth 3 stars. The poem that I picked was one that has always been a favorite of mine from my childhood. The picture that I chose was one that I took in France over the summer. I feel like the picture adds to the meaning of the words.
(3 stars)
I found this poem awhile ago on tumblr and it really spoke to me. Emotions for me are hard to explain. I know what I am feeling, but when it comes time to explain it with words my mind goes blank.
(cont.)
Well I didn’t care then what happened,
A Chink took me under his wing,
And down there in a hovel of hell —
I laboured for Hop and Ah-Sing
Oh no I’m no longer a “Junker”,
The police came and got me one day,
And I took the one cure that is certain,
That island out there in the bay.
Don’t spring that old gag of reforming,
A girl hardly ever goes back,
Too many are eager and waiting;
To guide her feet off of the track.
A man can break every commandment
And the world will still lend him a hand,
Yet a girl that has loved, but un-wisely
Is an outcast all over the land.
You see how it is don’t you honey,
I’d marry you now if I could,
I’d go with you back to the country,
But I know it won’t do any good,
For I’m only a poor branded woman
And I can’t get away from the past.
Good-bye and God bless you for asking
But I’ll stick out now till the last.
Yeah the actually Bonnie of the actual Bonnie and Clyde was a poet. Who knew?
The assignment was Poetry Art. I found the poem here, and then the image I used was this:
I chose the image because in my version of the Bonnie and Clyde story, they’ll be stirring up trouble on the east coast and then planning on driving out west and hiding somewhere in California, and I figure they’d drive through a lot of desert to get there. The photo editor I used is called pixlr and it’s an app you can find in the chrome webstore if you use google chrome as your browser. I only used that because my good computer with photoshop had run out of battery and I was feeling really motivated and didn’t want to wait for it to charge.
So the first thing I did was take my little magic wand to the sky to select it, and then I deleted it because I wanted to choose my own shade of blue for the sky. Then I took the main image layer and edited the curves, made it less saturated and warmed up the color.
Then I just used the gradient tool to do the sky, and I picked out a font and placement for the bit of the poem I was using. And then it was all done!
“Having A Coke With You” by Frank O’ Hara is a poem that reminds me of traveling and summertime simplicity and being simply enamored and captured by the person in front of you.
