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.