​​​TashaDavis​

In my Fine Arts class, my class started learning about an alternative to photoshopping. In this class we were having to create a new picture from one that we significantly altered from others. The reason we were doing this was because in our Language Arts class, we were building up a physical discription of a charater we were going to use for our Book-in-a Box project.  Our Art teacher used this to introduce us to the art of significantly altering images via computers, and how this skill can be applied to the real life. We were to create an image we could look at to use as our main character's accurate representation.

 

I have not actually grown in any subject that I was already learning, but have instead aquired the ability to change images and make them look as I want using an editing program. I ended up growing tremendously in this area while picking it up.

 

Before we were actually learned how to photoshop our characters together using Gimp (which I will from now on refer to as Gimping or Gimp), we practiced on a few images to learn how to cut them out of their surroundings (Cropping or Masking) and combine other images.

 

While we were learning this we looked at the art of a couple of different artists.  One of them was by a 14 year old boy and his sister who were photoshopping (Not Gimping) themselves into pictures of small objects and creating surreal images.  Another one was the a person who used photoshop to collage two images into one and merged the two images with a layer mask.  Imagine looking at your reflection on a peice of glass.  You can see you reflection but you can also see the things behind the glass.

 

My Art class learned how to do this for our first Gimp project.  We took an image of ourselves and cropped the background out from behind us. Then we learned how to add a layer mask and choose an image to hide us under.  Then we changed the opacity of everything.  Once again, it was like I could see my reflection but I could also see the image behind of it.  Except that here it was the other way around.  In the end, the work that I made was very beautiful and fairly easy.

 

Another peice that we were working on was actually for a project in Language Arts class called the Book-in-a-Box project. We were then able to put one image on top of another. This is called layering.  Layering and Cropping were the main things that we would use during the project.

 

When we were given the project originally, the base image we used as our Main Character needed to have at least three significantly altered features and learn to blend Layer Masks together (Images that have been cropped/masked and are a seperate layer).

 

When I found my Base Image, I was really happy. In fact, I would say that my biggest challege was finding the perfect images to combine. Not the actual combining like someone might think. I had been trying to find an image of someone with the perfect ponytail that I had in my head but the problem was finding it. This is because I was searching for a specific type of atribute in a normal picture but when I went to look for that picture with the attribute, the attribute that I wanted got emphasized far too much. For example, when I searched for a "girl with straight ponytail" I got pictures of just ponytails. The girls who wore them were turned around and I was unable to use the image as a Base.  Whenever I found a picture and the girl was facing front, her ponytail was over her shoulder.  I didn't want that.  Searching for an image was very hard in this aspect.  The wasy that I resolved this problem after I found my Base Image was to dumb down the search. I would simply search for ""Happy teen girl" instead of "female mouth".

 

Later we learned that we had to create some type of license for the character that we were creating.  After looking extensively at some different types of licenses, we were instructed to create our own.  Most people at this point looked up a driver's license for the state that their character lived in and just changed the image and information to match what they needed.  The problem with that was that they would have to work around the problem of the graphics in the background of the license.  When imediantly spotting this problem, I imediantly looked for a way around it that would be both more efficent and make my final product look better than it would other wise. The solution I found was simplicity itself.  Use a blank!  I found a blank/semi-blank driver's license and just put the image of my character over the one on the card.  I then used an actual Minnisota driver's license (aka: a Jane Doe license) to tell me what information was needed and where it needed to go to make it look like a real license.

 

After getting all the information onto the card in a font that was perfect for a driver's license, I found that there was only one problem. In an effort to either make that blank easier to write or easier to tell that it was a fake, the author of the blank had decided to put the replica seal of approval in the bottom right-hand corner instead of just right of the very center of the card.  I found a way of fixing this by just cutting the round seal out and placing it right where it should have gone in the first place. Because the background of the card was white, it did not appear that there was a gaping hole in the middle of my card. Because I layered my images and text correctly, I managed to get the seal on the card in the correct place but also put it underneath the text so it looked natural.

 

The best thing I learned was actually just how to use Gimp. On the original project, I was almost overwhelmed by the fact that photoshopping could be used for something so beautiful. Then I learned how to apply it to something that could help me for the rest of my life as I love to write and also fix any problems that might ocurr with my infinite-resource-and-sagacity* (or simply put: human inginuity).

 

Because of this expirence of mine, I will now be able to both express the beautiful ideas that are hidden in my mind and also create a better physical image for the characters that I create when making them.

 

* "Infinite-resource-and-sagacity" is term that was created by Rudyard Kipling.