The hardest part of this assignment was deciding which option to choose in order to complete the task.  Now I really understand how my students feel when I tell them to “be creative” and they look at me as if I am speaking Latin.  So, I settled for remixing the work of a famous artist and the piece of art I settled on was DaVinci’s Mona Lisa.  

I love tech.  There.  I said it (shocker, I know).  However, I do not love editing photos!  I would rather spend hours setting up the perfect shot with a camera, or finding a different way to portray the needed visual aid.  Why?  Patience.  The amount of detail that it takes to use photo editing software surprised me.  One little line to far to the left can ruin what you are trying to accomplish.  Overall, I think the image turned out well.  I like that I portrayed Mona as I feel she would be in today’s society.  AND, I gained a huge amount of respect for graphic artists!

How To:

1.  I used Pixlr as my editing tool.  After loading both images, I began with the image of a Mona Lisa skinned iPad.

2.  I created a white border around the image, to simulate an iPad case with the marquee tool feathered (feather setting) to 40.  After inverting the selection, I was able to color the entire portion outside of Mona Lisa’s iPad covering.

3.  Next, I used the free transform tool to rotate the image slightly so that when it was moved to the final image, it would looked natural in Mona’s hand.

4.  I created a new image with a transparent background and then I copied and pasted  the image of iPad Mona into this transparent background.  To make this happen, I used the inverted wand tool.

5.  I re-sized the transparent iPad Mona so that it was less than half the original size so that the iPad would look normal in Mona’s hand.  This was a lot of trial and edit/undo’s.  I really was just eyeballing the two images side by side in order to have the right size.

6.  I then copied the iPad image into the image of Mona Lisa, which created two layers on the untouched photo.  The next step was to create a third layer of just her hands so that I could sandwich the iPad between the two layers.  Using the wand tool, I carefully selected the hands – this was a pain!  With the hands now a layer, I placed them on top of the iPad image and erased the extra bits I missed with the wand.