A bit of hope goes a long way

I absolutely love this picture. Not because I made it, but because of everything that is in it. I love the colors, Dorothy's ruby shoes, the flowers, the heart, and my reminders of Paris. At first I was so stressed out about this assignment and then somehow it clicked. I looked at Blackboard and followed the instructions. I started adding the images and then just clicking random buttons to see how they would word out. I used multiply a lot for this picture. This picture consists of Dorothy's shoes outside of Harrods, some lily's, the Eiffel Tower, the sign for Hotel Astrid, and the outline of a heart that I took from a shop window. I wanted to not only bring different colors into this picture but also different textures. The Eiffel Tower is the best texture picture I had. Not only does the Eiffel Tower have great texture, but it is also one of my favorite pictures. All the pictures that I have taken of the tower have come out looking amazing. There was also something else I wanted in the exquisite corpse. I wanted to add words, which is where the Hotel Astrid sign came in. Before I even started I could visualize where I wanted everything to go. It was just a matter of fooling around. I also lightened up the image and changed the hue. I love bright neon colors so this picture really describes me. The colors really pop and draw in the viewers attention.

I really stressed out for nothing. Once I got the hang of it this assignment became really easy and a lot of fun.

When creating a font poem..."HOPE" for the best

When we were first given this assignment I had no idea what to do. I didn't even know a poem that I could use. So, my first step was to google some poems. I found some good ones, but most were either too long or too short. This is actually only the first few lines of an Emily Dickenson poem. I felt that even though the poem was cut, these sentences still had meaning.

It took me a while to figure out how to get a new document on photoshop, one with an actual background. After I figured this out I inserted my poem. I kept staring at it, hoping that something would pop out at me. I knew nothing of typography and had no idea where to begin. I knew I wanted to bring the words alive and make them pop. I was trying to bring out the main sense of hope. I feel that is a very strong word and it's important to always have hope. I wanted to make "hope" the focal point, so, i started by making it the largest word. Then I started to take a look at the fonts. I picked the key words in the poem and changed their font. I wanted the font to connect with the words and portray them accurately, so each word had a different font. The words that I felt were not as important were all given the same font. I also enlarged the font of all the main words, although leaving hope the largest.

Some of my font choices were intentional and others were merely done, because there were no other options. My favorite words are hope, soul, and sings. I wanted "hope" to look classy so I put it in a script font. There were a few to choose from, some were not very legible. I wanted this word to be clear. "Soul" was a difficult one to choose, but I wanted it to look edgy. Someone's soul is the very fiber of their being. I wanted the word to seem sharp and to the point, while also seeming mysterious. I felt that this font completed all three. At first, I did not know what to use for "sings." I scrolled through the fonts and came upon this one. After looking at this I thought it was perfect. I feel as though it looks like the font that is used for play titles. For instance, I feel like if you looked at a theatre and saw the play title in bright lights this is what it would look like.

I've found that typography is not as easy as it looks. It is in fact difficult and takes a great deal of time and thought.

Contact Sheet

As our first assignment, we had to do a project using photoshop. This really scared me, because I had never used photoshop before, I'd never even heard of DPI. I was going crazy trying to figure everything out, but suddenly, as we kept going, it started to make sense. The further we got in the assignment the easier it got. One night I went to the mac lab to work on the project and was going insane. I suddenly couldn't remember how to do anything. I had my notes with me, but they weren't as detailed as I needed them to be. The thing that I struggled with the most was making a picture Duotone. For the life of me I couldn't remember what to do to make the Duotone button show up. I was freaking out by myself and was about ready to pull my hair out until it clicked. If I striped the color from the image and made it black and white then I could add color to it. When I saw that this worked I was about to jump up for joy. I was so excited that I was able to figure it out. The other problem I had was with some of my picture choices. When I put them into photoshop and made them 300 DPI they would become blurry. I had so many that were like this that I was running out of choices. Luckily, I had more than six pictures on my flash drive. Despite all the problems, this assignment was not as bad as I thought it would be once I got the hang of it. I found that I actually like using photoshop and I think its a really helpful tool to have if you like playing around with pictures.

This is a close up of my favorite image from the contact sheet. I think the texture and shading make it look amazing.