tilt shift

Self-expression poster

I used a picture taken by a family friend in NC, Karen Lane, and cropped my face out of it. I thought about just using my smile, but I figured there'd be more to play with if I just used my face. I added different filters - because of the color of the photo, I kept them all in the same orage/gold color scheme, except for the ones I made black and white. I flipped a few of the images horizontally to add a different dynamic to the photo. I then created a text box with three words that describe me: quirky, loving, and intuitive. All very different parts of me, but all true! I had fun with this project. It's always good to become familiar with the different filters available.

kaleidoscope fun!

Flowers are fun and easy to make into kaleidoscope patterns - the contrast between the darker emerald greens and the lighter pink/yellow tones makes this double kaleidoscope interesting and aesthetically pleasing. Fun fact: I took the original picture at a graveyard in Edinburgh, Scotland.

 I go through phases where I use my body as a canvas. whether it's drawing on my legs with Sharpie or painting rainbows on my hand...it just happens. On one just day, I was feeling particularly inspired and used my hand as photographic inspiration. I never did much with the photo except keep it around for nostalgic purposes, but it does make a fun kaleidoscope!

This one is the most monochromatic as far as color goes, but the fun spikey patterns make it far from boring. This picture was also taken in Scotland - I'm not sure what kind of plant it is. I cropped a pretty small portion of the image to make the patterns stand out.

Wanted: Band Needed To Go With Album Cover

If you happen to belong to group of people hoping to form a chill new folk band and are in need of a swanky CD cover to stir their inspiration (or if by some phenomenon you're a young aspiring folk singer/songwriter named Daisy Days who hasn't quite put together an album yet), then you found the right blog! To make my CD cover, I compiled a set of pictures taken over the years - most in Scotland, actually. I worked with each layer, changing the saturation and opacity to blend them into one surrealistic image. I selected the Home Street sign and moved it onto the back cover image; I had to shrink the size of the entire image first because the sign was a tad bigger than I liked. I had fun with the text, adding drop shadows and strokes to make it easier to see. I was shown a nice little trick for the spine text - I simply rotated the image 90 degrees clockwise so it would type on a horizontal path, then rotated the image back! Overall,I think that the lightened opacity of the images impacted my CD cover the most, giving it a nice, summery feel.

Nonrepresentational Art Creation

I love abstract art (if you haven't figured that out already). Nonrepresentational pieces are perfect for me, since I have the innate inability to create something that looks like anything in the real world. I wanted this piece to be more of a mis-representation than a representation - the yellow/orange COULD be a sun, the blue/gray COULD be sky and clouds, the green COULD be flowers and grass, etc. Though the piece hints at a picture of reality, the filters and blending options I used in Photoshop allowed me to make an extremely jagged, fragmented picture. As a poet, I often find my work incomplete without some jangled word concoction. So while the poem wasn't necessarily part of the assignment...I couldn't help myself. :P

next year's halloween postcard

 While the blue-green background is less than terrifying, the story behind the haiku is (more or less) true. To retell the tale of last Halloween, I combined a picture of my bloody handprint on my friend's bathroom wall with an image of me and my boyfriend's zombie transformation (sorry if the grammar's off...in my sleep deprivated state I just can't make that phrase sound right).  I moved our cheery faces behind the handprint layer, set the opacity to about 70, and erased the top layer so our image would come through. I then captioned my portrait with one of my famous haikus, a skill I mastered during slow days at work. Even though the blood is admittedly fake and our zombie transformation purely artistic, we left an impression that night (of my hand, anyway) that still stands today.

Treacherous Adventure!

 My high school friend Alaina was always one for adventures. She and I spent many afternoons wandering fields, woods, and the local high point dubbed Occoneechee Mountain (though compared to Vermont, it was more like a pretty big hill). But one day she got a little reckless - I think it was around the time of our high school final exams - and decided to go out on a limb...literally. Luckily for her, studying for exams had given her both mental and physical super powers, and we all turned out okay.

I selected Alaina from the first image and moved her onto the second, though since the resolution of her cutout wasn't too great I created a separate layer for her image and sharpened it a couple times. I used the cloning stamp tool to fix the rough spots and help her blend in a little more. Here's to adventures!