The fourth project in our elements of design class was to use both photoshop and art of our own making to make a combination where a picture of us would be featured. Our personal picture would be displayed as a collage of polaroids that combined give more or less the full original image.

In this project I encountered a lot of difficulty and it, in the end, did not turn out as well as I hoped. The weakest aspect of the work if I had to name one was the basic composition, in initially making the polaroids too large I covered far too much of my supplementary drawing. This in turn also made the work look crowded and messy once I started bringing parts of the drawings forward. All this probably could have been avoided by using less or smaller polaroids. The strongest aspect of the work would probably have to be my original drawing… maybe. Before it became crowded with the polaroids it didn’t look too bad, but it also wasn't the best drawing i’ve ever done.

In working through the project I found some easier and harder parts. Personally the hardest part was getting the polaroids to appear on top of each other. It involved both selective and tedious use of the magic wand tool needing to select each layer before working and pixel perfect erasing after still needing to be careful of layers. The easiest part ironically came after and because of the difficulty in changing the polaroids. It was erasing parts of the picture of me where the polaroids did not fall that was easy, the polaroid frames let there be a lot of room for error and let me easily tell where I needed to erase.

The objective of the activity was to mix the two media sources that we had, the polaroid photos and our work of art. To do this I took parts of my drawing, which was in the background, and brought them forward with some of the polaroids. To do this I used the magic wand tool on parts of the drawing and copied what was selected. I took this new copied layer and dragged up in priority, they still covered the original parts but they also looked closer now. If I had to change anything about what I did with the project it would definitely start with the polaroid size and number. I would make them smaller and possibly less numerous so that the my drawing could be better seen and its aspects that were brought forward would make more sense. In conclusion I am not terribly happy with how this project turned out and I do think it is my weakest one of the year, but if I had to do it again I think it would turn out better.