MY WEBSITE!!!!

I'm not gonna say that this single project has left me with equal proficiency in Flash as I have in Photoshop...

That's it.

No, but it was fun, I would be able to make a website again without Mrs. Banks' assistance, I think. My favorite part of creating the website was being able to alter the images when the mouse goes over them, and I really like the way the page turned out! I'm very sad that this marks the end of my Photoshop journey, This has been my favorite class at Garza, and my school days will be that much longer without it. There were so many exciting projects I was able to do in this class, some of my favorites were the Vector Art, Pop Art, and the Melting projects. I wasn't really a fan of the final "Butterfly in Paints" image, but other than that I'm immensely proud of what I accomplished here.

I learned a lot in Digital Graphics, and I'm so glad that I got to learn it from Mrs. Banks because she's one of my favorite teachers. Ever.

For my FINAL Photoshop project, I made a show poster for The Diving Captain! It was a really fun project, and the band liked it so much that they printed it at Ginny's and actually used it--needless to say I'm proud! I found the pictures of a cowboy riding a bucking horse, a fire ant, and a rope, on Google. The skills that I used to create the poster included masking with the Pen tool and the Free form Pen tool, the Brush tool, the Magic Wand tool, the Text tool, and various Marquee tools. I also grouped layers into Smart Objects and desaturated layers, warped text, and used layer masks.
...That felt like name dropping...
The Pen tool is old news for me, it was pretty easy to mask out the parts of the pictures that
I didn't want on the poster. The Magic Wand actually helped a lot in that part, masking out large portions of the picture. I hadn't really used the marquee tools before this project, and I used them to create a box around the text. The part that was the most fun was trying to outline the cowboy on the ant to make it look like a neon sign. I think it turned out quite well, actually! It was a little difficult to pick appropriate colors, and to make it look like actual neon, but I played around with hardness and brush sizes until I felt good about it. You can't see it as well from the picture on the web, but the color sort of fades out, making it look more like light.I hadn't used the text tool or warped any text before, but they weren't very difficult; it was very fun to play around with fonts, and I found the perfect one for the cowboy/western theme of the poster!
The rope was honestly the most difficult, and annoying, part of the poster. It was really difficult to make it fit in with the rest of it, because it was a photo, it stands out a lot against the background and the painted picture. I used a layer mask on the rope, to try and blend it a little better, but it was unsuccessful. The rope is the only part I'm unhappy with in the final project, but it honestly doesn't look to bad...I am just picky :]
All in all, though, I'm really proud of this project! I'm reeeeally sad to be leaving Digital Graphics class, though, and I'm sure I'll find ways to sneak over and do Photoshop whenever I can!!

Bollywood Vector Art

I'm really glad that I chose Vector Art as my last Photoshop project, partly because it was really fun and challenging, but also because it took a lot of time and I got to spend more time in Digital Graphics class :]. I chose this project because it seemed really interesting, and vector art is a very good skill to know for a digital artist, which is definitely a career (or at least a hobby) that interests me. One thing I discovered during this project was the Free form Pen tool, which I found helpful for creating shapes quickly; however it was more of hindrance when I needed to change the shapes, because the anchor points it created moved the outline inversely, so I could never get quite the right shape. Another tool I used quite often, besides the pen tool, was the gradient tool. It was fun to play around with merging different layers and changing the transparencies to make the shapes look closer to the original picture, and I think I was successful! The part that was most challenging for me was the hair, because it has so many different tones and shapes in it, and the roots are darker and the ends lighter than most of the hair. It was difficult to make it look like one cohesive part of her body. I'm not sure if I'm completely satisfied with the end product of the hair, but I'm pretty sure it's the best that I could have made it. I'm really proud of how the head turned out, especially the eyes and the earring. I think that those turned out really well, I captured the different colors in the eyes perfectly, if I may say so m'self! And the earrings look very realistic, and really pretty. I'm very proud of this project, it's definitely the most pride I've felt for a Photoshop project out of all of them!