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