It’s time for arts and crafts kids!

For this visual assignment, I had initially wanted to do this IRL with actual materials like doilies, flowers, and what not. Unfortunately, time did not permit the shopping for said materials and so I chose to do it digitally:

A little part of me is happy I decided to stick to digital media for this…

Let me explain a few items on this board, if you don’t mind;

The polaroid to the top left corner is from when a friend and I visited the Hirshhorn Museum for the Yayoi Kusama Infinity Mirrors exhibition. I love this photo and cherish it because it feels like we’re in space.

The polaroid in the bottom right corner is of my fiancé, Anthony, and I during our last trip to Disneyland. It was my first time visiting after moving away from California in 2007.

Of course you will notice a lot of anime references; Sailor Moon, Gundam SEED, YURI on ICE!!!, and Neon Genesis Evangelion. All animes that I have a lot of love and dedication towards. There’s also my girl, Tina Belcher from Bob’s Burgers and a cute feminine Pikachu because she’s looking extra classy. There is also a drawing of me! It’s a commissioned piece by a local artist whom I love dearly. She’s drawn a lot of things for me and friends.

If you have any questions on anything else on the board; please feel free to leave a comment below and I will be more than happy to explain!

Thanks for stopping by and I’ll see ya’ll tomorrow.

Taylor

Summer always worsens my persistent cabin fever and wanderlust, especially for the seaside with its unique charm. I don’t know if I can wait until August for my “Vitamin Sea” after scrolling through all these beautiful pictures on Pinterest! But at the moment I am trapped inside, working on my projects for Digital Storytelling. Which is why I immediately chose the “You In Collage Form” Assignment from the Visual Assignment Bank, thinking of the vacation ideas I was pinning earlier (to see some, check out my travel-themed Pinterest board “Dream Passport”).

I was inspired by the casual layout that Pinterest provides to structure each board, arranging the different sized Pins so that they snap into preset spaces of varying standard sizes. However, after trying five different online collage makers, I could not recreate that effect. So I found that my best approximation was making a “PowerPoint” (actually using the Google Drive software’s Google Slides, free online with a Gmail account) that is sized to be a 3′ x 4′ poster so  I could fit everything in. If printing posters weren’t so expensive, I would actually love to print it. Then I simply added photos via url, which works seamlessly with Google Chrome’s menu option “Copy link address” and probably just as well with other browsers. I resized photos to optimize their clarity, as well as based on the importance they had, and arranged them around the frame of the background. The only involved photo-editing was turning the picture I chose for the center black and white, and cutting it into the shape of a heart, so it would stand out from the rest and break the block-y appearance it had. Finally, to make the background a little more subdued, I increased the transparency of the background image 10%, centered it, and made the slide color dark blue. And voila, a fun collage that tells you something about me.

Still wish I was going to the beach though.