The selfie Project

Our second project this year in Elements of Design was to create an image in photoshop using a mish-mash of other images we found on the internet that represents us. In creating the image we were tasked to use a couple new photoshop tools that helped us alter the images we found to fit our own uses and look good together, along with this we still had to follow some of the four design elements we used in the first project. The new tools were using filters on images to change their look, using the layer makes to change how they look on top of each other, and blend modes that makes the images used seem to be continuous. Other than this the basic art elements such as contrast or proper alignment, in my image proper alignment was achieved through avoiding the middle of the image and having focal points on its fringes which the film strip helped in. Contrast in the picture was seen in multiple areas such as the night sky verses the computer board on opposite ends of the picture or Hobbs being bright colors on the dark background of the night sky.

My project has its own ups and downs having areas I like and areas or aspects I dislike. The works strongest aspect I think is how it is split into two areas of ⅓ and ⅔ creating an appealing proper alignment. On the opposite end of the spectrum is how I think the figurines on the filmstrip itself turned out, they don’t look like like they belong on the background and don't blend very well. This may be fixed by moving them somewhere else, changing the film color, or maybe playing heavily with filters.

There were some hard parts of the project as well as some easy ones. The easiest part was definitely setting up the background that only took a couple swipes of the erase tool and simple filters after the images were selected. The images on top of the background such as getting the space man right took a lot of work and sweat. From cropping him off of a similar background that messed with the magic wand tool to getting the the filters to not destroy parts of the image which made me hand color some parts differently, in all that part was a pain but turned out well.

What I would change if I had to do this project again is how I used the blend and layer mask tool. I did not use them liberally enough which resulted in some unneeded rough edges that pulled the work down and also made the overall lighting weird. Otherwise I am happy with the result and would not change too much.