altered images

            After opening the images in Photoshop, I cropped them, selected them, and copied and pasted them over to my 3-image grid. For each image that I included, I first went to “Edit,” then “Transform,” and “Scale,” so that each image could fit in their box accordingly.
            For the picture of my boyfriend Chris and I after he fell asleep on the couch, I added +3 red to the color balance, and -35 on the yellow-blue scale, to increase the yellow hue. I liked the sunny tinge it added to the photo. Then, I noticed you can also adjust the shadows this way. I added +51 blue. I feel it added some density to the picture. I was tempted to add heavy blue to the highlights, because I love the look of blue television light on peoples’ faces, for some reason. I didn’t end up doing this though.
            I increased the brightness on the kitty, (Dutch), because the photo was taken indoors in dim light, while the doggy, (Gypsy), was shot outdoors and did not require a brightness adjustment. I didn’t want Gypsy to steal the show, so I also added +54 vibrance, +25 saturation, and a bit less contrast so Dutch’s cute face didn’t look so dark. Also, because the background is so white in this photo, the added saturation created a greenish tint. Some people find this hue unpleasant, but I like it and Dutch needed more color.

Save the Turtles

I'm unable to upload the PDF file here. But I learned how to Place the turtle pictures and word document into the InDesign artboard. I learned how to edit the space the document takes up. I added my turtle, used the Free Transform tool to scale him down and I rotated him t look like he's walking onto the poster. I added a title, with a green swatch and blue border. For the background of the sea I lowered the opacity to 82% and used the gradient feather tool to make it fade into the white of the poster. I gave the sea background its own layer so that I could place it underneath the text. Then, I added all the pictures of turtles to the right third of the poster.

Logo/Silhouette Boxes

Yet again, another one that made me want to rip my hair out. I will never be hired to make logos, nor do I want to. That's what my stepdad does. Anyways, I tried to use the pen tool as much as I possibly could without having a meltdown, I honestly hate that tool, I really do. I used some shapes, lots of gradient background. I got better at making hearts. I only filled about half of the 64 boxes. I couldn't take it anymore, so whala.

Pear with Pen Assignment

I've had a very hard time using the pen tool, but I think practicing with the pear has made me understand how to use it better. Even though my gnarled looking pear doesn't reflect this very well, I am proud of how it came out anyway. The leaves definitely look like leaves, even if the pear looks like the most unattractive, inedible pear ever. I chose for it to be brown because I prefer brown pears over green; they're sweeter. I learned more about how to use the anchor points in the pen tool, and how to control the curves a lot better.

Boxes assignment

I've never had such a tedious assignment before in my life and I hope I never have to do this again. I think it's just because I don't have the mind to put 36 different designs inside boxes. This was definitely the assignment I enjoyed doing the least. I can appreciate the mosaic style though; I always have liked mosaic and tile artwork when I've seen it. My mom used to do clay tile-work like this, only much much prettier. 

I used the shapes and some gradients to fill the boxes often, but I was getting sick of that, so I'd also use some spirals and line segments, some arched. I also found some floral patterns I liked. When my impatience was at its peak, I added some faces in the boxes.

I like the reflection tool, I can see myself using it in the future, just not with something like this.

Social Awareness Poster Final Draft

The only changes I made to my first draft of the poster are the color of the type, the font, and I added some extra info. I was told that the red type was a little hard to see, so I made it white, to pop out in both sections of the poster where I put type. I changed the font to something that, I thought, looked a little bit more intimidating. Then, I thought it'd be a good idea to add a support website so that viewers could have something to go to after seeing the poster, if they wished to.

Posters Draft #1

Both of my social awareness posters are for the opioid epidemic.
For my first poster of the iceberg, I used the hide all layer mask to fade in the needle into the iceberg. I used the blur tool to blend the little silhouettes of people into the water and the iceberg. I used the quick selection tool for all of the silhouettes.

For my second poster, I found another black silhouette of a backpacker. This image I magnetic lassoed and copied and pasted. I used the reveal all layer mask to make the bright red color fade onto the pavement background. I used a freehand lasso to cut out the ball and chain so that I could paste in onto my poster and make it look like it was around the backpacker's ankle. I used the eraser and blur tool to clean it up. I then selected, copied, and pasted a small needle onto the ball, but didn't fade it like I did in my first poster. For the words I couldn't find a font in Photoshop that I thought was strong enough, so I went onto 1001freefonts.com and found this one. I downloaded it and installed it onto Photoshop and used the color navy to contrast with the red.

Citations for Images
silhouettes of people taken from the following websites: rfclipart.com and canstockphoto.com, and getdrawings.com
image of needle: newsadvance.com
Iceberg, a photo from NASA, "an example of how icebergs may look underwater."
Backpacker- 123RF.com
Pavement-advancedpavement.com
Ball and chain- gettyimages
Font from 1001freefonts.com

Retouching

For the image of an old photograph of a house torn to bits, I used the magnetic and free-for lasso tool to drag stray pieces of the photo back where they fit. I also lassoed and cut away the stray paper parts on the edges of the pieces. However, there were some parts of the photo that didn't have a piece to put there. On the roof there was a missing piece where more roof and some plant should be so I selected and copied a chunk of another part of the roof and dragged it over. I did the same with the plant. They fit quite nicely. I used the ink dropper and the paint brush to fix some discoloration and the blur tool to blend in the lines in the roof. I also used the healing brush tool with the gray granite pattern and low hardness to blend and piece together small separation lines. For some of the bigger separation lines throughout the whole image, I used the clone stamp tool. I had to bring the brush down to a very small size in order to clone stamp dark lines into parts of the roof. I found the top left of the roof particularly difficult to do. I tried to think about the lighting every time I used the clone stamp tool, so that I wasn't just dragging one particular shade of a bush or tree into the whole object. I most difficult part of the editing was probably removing the lines and discoloration caused by the tape in the middle of the photo and creating some missing corners of the photo purely from scratch. For that, I increased the hardness by almost 100%. Once I drew on corners, I used the polygonal lasso tool to straighten and cut out the flaws, making straighter lines. Finally, I used the eraser to get rid of all the leftover scraps.

Bedroom Waves

On all objects I cropped I used the magnetic selecting tool.  I coped and pasted the waves onto the wooden bedroom floor to make it look like the room was filled with this gushing seawater. I used the warp tool to lower the left side of the wave so you could see more of the window in the bedroom I added a reveal all layer mask gradient to fade the waves into the wood floor. I added the bed and rotated it slightly as if it were being rocked by the wave. I used the gradient tool again to fade the bottom of the bed into some white foam of the wave. I used the ink dropper to select the vibrant blue green of the water and then used the brush tool to paint the harsh black lines around the pillows blue. I use the blur tool to blend the entire bed into the waves more. I added lightning in a cloudy, dark sky outside the bedroom window. I cropped it, scaled it to the right size, and skewed it to fit the window frame. I put a revealable gradient from this image to the top of the window, though it was a very small one. I raised the wave near the window and the seagull by using the warp tool. I wanted to make it look like the seagull was coming out of the water and sort of through the window so I gave him a hide all gradient and stopped shading him in right about to where his neck meets the water. I used the ink dropper and a 92% opacity brush tool with a low hardness level to fill in some spots on his neck with blues from the water and whites from his neck to blend him in more. I cropped and scaled down the alarm clock. It was already angled perfectly to fit in the seagulls mouth. I also liked how the red of the alarm clock kind of popped in contrast to the cool colors of the rest of the photo; except for the way the waves blend into the bright golden wood floor, making it look almost like lava. I used a small reveal all gradient from the throat of the seagull to the edge of the clock to make it look more like it is under the shadow of the bird's beak and in its mouth. I used the ink dropper tool and a 40% opaque brush with similar level hardness to blend the back of the clock into the birds mouth.
I used the magnetic lasso to crop the girls arm and partial hair and then pasted it into my composition. I used the eraser to get rid of some of her head and whiteness under her hair from the previous photo to make it look more realistic and blend it in. Then I used the blur tool over her entire arm to soften the harshness and then just around the outline of her dark hair; I still wanted the detail of the hair in it.

I suppose you could say this image represents how I felt during the alarming end of summer.


The images of the seagull, the alarm clock,  the thunder and the blue bedroom are all from pixels.com The waves were from pixabay.com and the bed was from a website called funkyjunkinteriors.net The photo of the woman's head and arm I got on bestlifeonline.com under an article called "17 Daily Habits that are Ruining Your Brain." by Grant Stoddard

Composition on Color, or "Cats in Heat"

My Own Background

Originally, for this assignment, I had one of those early moments of pure ambition, creativity, and impulse. I downloaded a bunch of free images of fireworks and I had the idea of photoshopping them into someones eyes. I also wanted many pictures of cats included with lots of warm colors that popped. Then, when I actually sat down to find the right photo, obviously, it didn't work out. But I decided to stick with the cats and the reds, oranges, and yellows against black, especially when I found this old photo on my phone of Fox Tower's silhouette against the sunset in Henry Park, Vernon, CT.

Main Cat

 I simply began by sizing the background photo to 10x14. Then, it took me much time to lasso another free image of a cat on a branch in front of a moon. I wanted to remove the moon and just get the silhouette. The magnetic lasso was giving me a hard time every time I started tracing the cats tail and I wanted the branch to look skinnier and more crooked, so I did the regular lasso by hand and stuck the cat in a tree. I had left a little bit of the red moon from the original image in the copy on accident, so I went over that with a small black paintbrush to blend it into the tree. To make this image look more natural, I used the blur tool, decreased the hardness, and made it pretty tiny and then zoomed in a lot so I could trace a blur accurately and melt the layers together.
 For the main kitty, the large grey one, I wanted it to look like it was gazing up at the sky, unaware of the rest of the scene around it. I thought this was a very well focused photo and I wanted to include the whiskers. I used the magnetic lasso to select the cat, excluding the parts of the whiskers that were outside of the cats frame, zooming in to match the fur as best I could (this was easy since the cat was against black already). Then, I used the polygonal lasso on two different sections of his whiskers, (the ones on his head and the ones on his nose). I had tried using the magnetic lasso, but I found it much easier just being able to control the straight lines myself. Then, I pasted the image onto my composition and lines up his whiskers the best I could. I ended up erasing one of them near his nose, because I just lassoed it too thick. I used a combination of the blur tool and a high-opacity black paintbrush to blend the cat into the black more. I added some translucent black around the top of his head and his right ear to add more depth and make him look more like he was actually in the scene rather than just plastered on top. I used a 12% opacity to achieve this.

Fireworks and more

So, I decided to add the reflection of fireworks to the cats eye anyway. I roughly lassoed an image of two fireworks bursting together, kind of tracing around some defined lines, but more just circling it. Then I pasted it onto my composition and scaled it waaaayy down to fit inside the cat's eye. For all images, I went to Edit, Transform, and then Scale. To make it look like a reflection, I went to Edit, Fill, chose the Clear option and put Opacity at 20%. Then, I made my Blur brush very small, zoomed in, and circled the fireworks to blend it in. I used the brush tool to add a subtle, opaque white back to the gleam that was originally in the cats eye, and used a size 1 black brush to get that little slit in the cats eye more defined.
Then, I put an image of a different fireworks that'd be easier to lasso in the sky above the scene. But this time I had to lasso the fireworks more carefully and blend the color of the sky using the blur and brush tools. I was going to do the same Clear fill I had on the other fireworks, but it decreased the intensity of the brightness and color by a lot. I used the eyedropper tool to take the color of the sky in the background photo, brought opacity to 25% and the size of the brush down to 3px and blended in some of the harsh black lines in the firework.

I added two kittens in the foreground, roughly magnetic lassoed them and copied and pasted them into the composition. I blurred around their bodies with a small blur tool and then did a small black brush with 13% opacity just to make them look like they're more a part of the dark ground they're on. I added a close up shot of the sun and scaled it down to look like a ball the cats are playing with, using the eyedropper to made a opaque yellow and blend the sun in.

The last image I added was a plane, and I choose a free image of one in front of either a sunrise or sunset, so that it would blend with the sky in the background well. All I did with it is scale it down and blur out the edges a bit.

Adjustments

For some reason I couldn't make adjustments to the entire image as a whole, so I saved the project, reopened it and then started playing. I increased the exposure by 51+. As for the color balance, I did +53 Red, -43 Magenta, and -48 Yellow. I wanted my composition to be focused on color, since I chose that out of all the topics given on the assignment description. I wanted the reds and yellows of the sky, fireworks, and sun to be intensified and blend together beautifully.


****The background image is my own, and all other images included were found on pexels.com****

About Me

Hey Guys
This is where I'm going to tell you all about me. I'm never asked this so I'm just going to start with the basics and trail off from there until two paragraphs have formed themselves.
It's not letting me indent; that bothers me. Fact #1: only the small things bother me. So, Fact #2: I've lived in Connecticut my whole life. I don't plan to anymore as soon as I graduate from Quinnipiac in two years, and boy I can't wait. Though I have appreciated the small beauties that reside in this state, and the close proximity to more entertaining areas like the rest of New England outside of Connecticut, I've also learned as I got older than Connecticut can and will suck every penny it has out of me for the rest of my life unless I leave. I'm not much of a summer girl, but the plan is California to find a decent job in production and so that the winter doesn't keep destroying every car I purchase, which leads us to Fact #3: I enjoy spring, but I have a hard time feeling positive when the temperature is above 79 degrees.
I highly enjoy cooking and baking, though it will never be my career. I do plan to own some sort of diner and/or bar when I retire though; no rude customers or vegans allowed. I've been working in kitchens for about five years and the one I currently work in is an Italian pasta shop in Rocky Hill, CT. I make a lot of good food there, but some people make some not so great food so just be careful.  Though I like cooking, others' awareness of my abilities sometimes creates a nuisance. I often get roped into making food on my own because I "just make it so much better," says my lazy boyfriend.
Along with cooking, I like playing drums and ultimate frisbee. I love cats, dogs, knitting, hiking and watching movies. I also like to write, but I do not do that as often as I should, because when you envision something you love to do as a career, it suddenly becomes almost a chore.
There's a lot more I could say, but I'm just going to leave it at that and add a photo of some nutella puff pastries I made at work a few weeks back.