This photo was taken of my boyfriend and I on our vacation to Florida this past summer.  (Don’t be fooled the photos were totally staged by his mom and sister)

LJ & I have been together since we were seniors in High School so.. I guess we are considered to be High School sweethearts <3 We had the same gym class freshman year, shared mutual friends, and saw each other on a daily basis at school but we never spoke to one another.  Our senior year a friend and I decided to become managers for the boys basketball team (LJ was of course on the basketball team). During the season our relationship and friendship with one another began to grow.  And, well here we are 3 and a half years later!  We do literally everything together.  If we aren’t together than we are blowing up each others phone with texts, calls, etc.  I guess you can say we will eventually live happily ever after!

“I really wish he would just find someone else to answer his questions. How am I supposed to get any work done if he thinks I’m the only person in this building who knows how to train…”

“…I can’t wait to start school. I’ll meet new people and finally have time for my friends; I don’t need to be in a relationship this time. It’ll only distract me from my work and keep me from branching out. I’ll be fine on my own…”

“…It’s only for the summer. When August comes, I’ll be busy and he’ll drop off. There’s really no harm in just hanging out for a few months. It’ll be fun, and we’re just friends, really, nothing serious…”

“…I can’t believe my freshman year is over already. It’s nothing that I expected it to be. Meeting people while living at home was so much harder than I ever imagined. I’m so glad I had my friends from high school who took the same courses as me. I don’t know what I would have done without them, or without Alex, either. He made everything bearable even when I was doubting what I was doing here…”

“…My graduate school applications are finally done. Everything feels like a blur and I’m not really sure how we got here. It’s time to start planning to get our own place. Where are we going to end up? Will I go straight to school? Will I need to get a research job first? What’s he going to do? I’m so glad I have him, I’m not sure I could handle this on my own.”

One of our tasks this week was to complete the “love at first shot” visual assignment, but to also add a design element by altering the photograph. I had a really, really, REALLY hard time with this. I knew I wanted to use a picture of myself and my boyfriend because I know our story the best. But when it came to deciding on how to alter the photo, since the directions say significantly, I was completely and utterly lost. I thought back to what I read in Vignelli’s canon, and knew that whatever I ended up doing needed to be meaningful and able to stand on its own.

I didn’t want to just throw on some funny stickers or change the lighting or add little twinkling, blurry stars in the background. I dabbled with cutting out the background and adding in different scenery to create a GIF, but it all just felt really cheesy. There had to be something I could do to edit the picture that wouldn’t make it look gaudy or cliche. I actually went and sought out some advice from a friend who is also in the course, and she was able to point me in a solid direction. I decided on a really simple color splash technique which I think makes a statement without being too flashy.

Before I talk about how I did the color splash, I want to talk about why I went with it. I’ve been with my boyfriend Alex for almost four years now. We met while working a local movie theater after I was assigned to train him. At the time, I was not really interested in getting involved in a relationship and resisted spending time with him for quite awhile. Eventually we started hanging out and one thing led to another and here we are. I wanted my edit to really bring the focus on us, and color splashing is the perfect way to do that. It puts everything else in the background and really shines the light on us.

So now that you understand the why, let me explain the how. My first attempt to do the color splash was on GIMP. I searched around for a tutorial online that would help me separate the background and foreground so I could make the background black and white without impacting the rest of the image. I found one here, and the process was relatively simple. I uploaded my picture, hit ctrl + L to open the layers dialogue and duplicated the layer. I then went to color at the top and selected the option to de-saturate the image and make it black and white. Using the brush tool, set on black, I painted over the image on the areas where I wanted color to pop through. When I was done, the image looked pretty good. After I uploaded it here, though, there was obvious streaking and huge problems with color showing up places where I didn’t want it.

I downloaded and Iphone app called photo splash, which was recommended by a friend, and used that to do the splash. It was as simple as just brushing over the areas I wanted colors. This app had a more user friendly brush that was easy to adjust for size and I was much happier with the lines in the end product. I uploaded it to flickr and added a filter layer to make the background pop a little more. After that, it was finally complete!

Love at First Shot: Take/Find a picture of a couple who are obviously in love. Use the picture to tell a story. Give the story some background and maybe even create a dialogue between the two or tell the story from each point of view. Just give it some detail and create a background to your photo! It can be a true story or a completely made up one, just have fun with it! (2.5 stars).

Ty and Krista had wanted to get married ever since they met in high school. They were always friends with the same people, but never got connected since Krista was one year younger than him. Until one small party at Ty’s best friend’s house, they ended up sitting on the same couch got to finally talk. He knew of Krista, thought she was really cute, but never thought it would ever happen with her. “She was one of those girls who was too good for me,” Ty said. She brought up her favorite ice-cream restaurant and he talked about his classes. There was a spark and they exchanged numbers, and started dating instantly. “He was a year above me, smart and funny, I really liked him,” Krista said.

A few short years later, Ty went off to college, leaving Krista scared and at home alone. Ty didn’t know what was to come, but he sure did love Krista. With FaceTime every Tuesday and lots of short visits, the couple stayed together, beating all odds. “No one ever did this. Every couple we knew broke things off after high school,” Krista stated. The couple continued at separate colleges, still visiting and basically being a second student at the other’s school. They had become closer than ever before and started thinking about the future together.

And after they both graduated from their own universities, Ty went to Medical School and pursued his dream of being a doctor. Krista was still in the midst of applying to graduate schools, she still had no idea what she wanted to do with her life, but she did know she wanted to be with Ty. “She was always the one. I knew I needed to make it real.” Ty said, smiling. He popped the question one night, on the beach, with fireworks in the background.

The couple “Tyed” the knot in October at an outdoor hometown setting with flowers and an ice-cream cake. Krista and Ty had a wonderful, laid-back wedding with their friends and family who all knew this was the plan since the beginning. “Ty and Krista always worked. He was perfect for her.” Krista’s best friend Elaine said.

Ty and Krista are still in love, living 15 minutes from the Atlantic Ocean, and trying to decide what color to paint the walls in their new house.

For this visual assignment, I chose a short clip and made it into a GIF. I wanted to use a clip of a couple being happy at their wedding, which is just the beginning of a two people’s life together. I think a picture wouldn’t do this couple justice. I thought these two looked insanely happy at their wedding, so I created a GIF. I think sometimes couples talk too much, (don’t get me wrong, talking is very needed), but in this GIF, my character, Krista, is just giddy as can be and is dancing around. Meanwhile, Ty is just staring and smiling at his beautiful bride. I wanted to direct the attention to this, because this is what love is! I clipped the GIF at this point so this would be the focus. In relation to design elements we have been discussing, the couple is both wearing the color white, which means light and/or perfection. I thought this color also accurately correlated with the story I told of Krista and Ty.

I really enjoyed this assignment, maybe because I love weddings so much?! I also like creating stories and I think my story represents the happiness that is being shown in the GIF. My inspiration comes from being happy and knowing the feeling of being loved.

—SALTY SKINN

They were childhood friends one minute, and high-school sweethearts the next. The one thing they both had in common was that they never confessed their love to each other, out of fear that the other would fail to reciprocate it. Every one of their former classmates saw the writing on the wall, and were even willing to gamble away their hard-earned allowance money, just so they could say they knew exactly when the two became a legitimate couple. Then, he turned eighteen, and he moved away to a new town to start his college education, without so much as a minute to say goodbye to friends and family, let alone her. Suffice it to say, she wasn’t the only one with a broken heart on that day.

It would take years for the lonely lady to get her bearings straight after the announcement that he was leaving her. As part of her lengthy recovery, she moved to Los Angeles to work at a record store, painting album covers for the local acts, performing on the Sunset Strip. She had settled down for a single life under the California sun, but one afternoon, after she put down her brush, and washed her hands of her daily demolition, a familiar face caught her eye, right across the street from her.

Her one-time friend, none the worse for wear after years on campus, had also moved to Los Angeles to settle down, after graduating as a valedictorian in his class. He was supposed to find a job soon, given how little money he had left, but he knew the importance of “first things first;” keeping this in mind, he tried to find himself, so he knew what he was getting into, in this new location of his. He was going to a local record store, to see if he could find a part-time there, or, at least, some music to listen to as he continued to unpack at his new apartment, after his lengthy tour of Beverly Hills; instead, he came across a familiar face, right across the street from him.

When their eyes met, it was like he never left: The same clothes they wore the day he went away still fit them even now, and the scene playing out between them felt like something out of a paperback novel…after the traffic had cleared, of course. The two started walking towards each other, meeting in the middle of the road, near the two yellow lines that kept many a car from crashing into each other. This time, though, it was not to be, as the two finally, albeit silently, confessed their love for one another, with a kiss on the lips, as rush hour drew to a close. The two were grateful to see that they were both okay, long after he had to leave her, and officially restarted their relationship, right where it left off.

TWO-AND-A-HALF STARS

I chose Cthulu and Zoidburg, because why not Zoidburg?  I mean look, they are both crustaceans displaced from the world they know, who are just trying to feel a little bit more at home.  They both have icky tentacle faces, so kissing doesn’t weird them out, which is a big plus in a dating market that is 99.9999999% non-crustacean non-face tentacle non-monsters.

They met one day as Zoidburg was down on the beach shedding for the summer, as Cthulu emerged from his ancient slumber to bring destruction to all mankind. As he crested the water, Zoidburg noticed how the sun reflected off of his slimy green wet skin, and couldn’t help but get a bit excited.  In the custom of his people, he erected his mating foliage and began to dance in an assertive and dominant manor to get Cthulu’s attention.  Cthulu saw this, and thought it was cute how pathetic and meek the tiny crab man was.  He thought of how little the red one knew about the universe, and the struggle behind the veil on consciousness, kind of like his favorite T.V. character, John Snow.  Cthulu flapped his mighty wings and in an instant the water parted from around him as he glided effortlessly out of the water and onto the beach.  Their eyes met, and there was no stopping it then.  They both felt it, and one of them dealt it, as the universe shuttered under the weight of their intent.  Thousands died, but were happy to do so in the service of all things imminent in the flow of the universe.  Their consummation was unholy, and to speak of it would cause one’s sanity to fade into a place unbeknownst  and inconceivable.  No one was left wanting that day, which is more than anyone wanted in the first place. <3 <3 <3