For the inactivity. I have an 8 to 5 during the summer and I haven’t had much time to ’shop. I’m trying to work out time, though, because I have some neat ideas!
I’m (not) Gay!
Worth1000 prompt “If Mother’s Day Card Told the Truth”
Click to enlarge.
Evaluation: I feel okay about this. It’s not amazing, it’s not terrible… it’s amazingly average! Also, I’m not gay, just for the record.
Thanks to stock.xchng for…
The Fluidity of the Web
So here’s a gem I found the other day:
You give it a website and it will make it “look like it was made by a 13-year-old in 1996.” It’s a pretty fun little tool and my blog looks TERRIBLE. Comic Sans? Yellow background? A gif of a guy farting in the corner? Oh, god. Get me back to 2010.
Okay. So let’s think about this.
Geocities started in 1994 and was a pretty big deal because it allowed normal people to create websites (this was, of course, Web 1.0 and the website would soon morph to blog) without knowing much about code… or, as it turns out, web design. Geocities is a joke now because of the terrible graphics and stupid gimmicky gifs that littered pages. Check out Internet Archaeology for an interesting take on archiving that stuff.
So now the cool blog to have is tumblr. WordPress isn’t really “hip” with the college-aged crowd. Tumblr seems to be where there computer literate kids go while blogspot is also getting a little outdated.
But here’s a thought: in 20 years, when I’m 40, I’ll be looking at the tumblr I made thinking “oh, god. Get me back to 2030.” It almost makes me wish that everything we do on the internet isn’t archived. For example, there will hopefully be a time when I look at these Photoshop prompts and think “I was so terrible with that program. Thank god I have cs53 and know what I’m doing now.” Isn’t that crazy?!
How to Evade Your Taxes
Sure the class is over, but the Photoshop will never be over! This blog will hopefully stick around for a while.
Worth 1000 contest Book Review 3: Books that will never be published.
Evaluation: I worked pretty hard on this one. Perspective is difficult for me and I can still see some things I wish I had done better but I overall I like hat the book looks real. I used a blank book image to start with. My favorite part are the green lines that go around the book, I think they really bring it to life. Also, Douglas H. Shulman is the guy in charge of the IRS.
Thanks to
stock.xchng for the blank book
Cool!
If you search “photoshop prompt” on Google I’m the first hit. Neat!
Final (I think) DS106 related post
Course Evaluation…
I really liked this class because I liked the freedom that we had. I enjoyed being able to set my own time frame of getting work done and that I picked my own stuff to do. I also liked that I branched out and tried new Photoshop techniques that I wouldn’t have done before. No, I’m definitely not perfect at the program, but I feel that I have become a lot better at imagining what I want the outcome to look like and getting it done. In the beginning I had problems because I wouldn’t really know what I was doing while I started and had no clear end point. I then learned that it’s okay to fool around with the program but it’s essential that I know what I want the end result to look like.
The only thing that I can see that would work better with the program is that I preferred that my last name never be used on the internet which worked out for me (since Rocket acts as a last name I guess) but other students had their last names posted and I’m not sure if this was ever discussed. Next time maybe every student should fill out a form at the beginning of the class including things like Twitter, site, etc and whether or not they want their last name to ever be used in class texts.
About halfway through my digital story, which was doing Photoshop prompts, I started to wonder if what I was doing was a “digital story.” So, I went back through my blog to think about this idea. I decided that this was indeed a digital story, here’s why…
When I started playing around with creating images on the computer I was in middle school and I was experimenting a lot with Microsoft Paint. Here’s something that I did from those days:
Click it to enlarge it. I have about 10 pictures like this one. I spent so, so many hours in front of our old HP desktop tinkering with these pictures. I only used Microsoft Paint on these, no other program. I did a lot of counting pixels and stuff like that and all of my images are perfectly symmetrical. Anyway.
Then when I got to high school I got to play with Photoshop when I joined Newspaper. I was clueless for a while but I picked it up pretty fast and was the to go guy for all things design related and eventually became the Design Editor. I remember the day that I found out how to make “iPod People” and we used that technique a lot in the issues to follow. I think my favorite work I did for that class was when we did a piece on “ghostriding” and I got my brother to stand on our car and I filled him and the car with black. When that got in the paper it looked awesome with the text wrap. Anyway.
Basically my Photoshop prompts do tell a story. You can see that I learned a few things comparing the first prompts to the last ones. But, it’s also part of a larger story of how I got interested in all of this in the first place. I deleted most of the old pictures I made when I was trying out filters, effects, etc in high school. I slowly graduated from learning filters to learning tools, and I think that’s an important piece of this story. Anyone can hit a few buttons in the Filter Gallery, but it takes more skill to learn how to use the tools.
I just had that realization and I think it sums up the class pretty well for me. Building on what I learned in this class I wrote a paper for my American Studies 201 class about memes, YouTube, and Web 2.0. One of the major themes of that paper is that Web 2.0 sees the internet itself as a tool for the user. Just like Photoshop won’t make you an amazing artist without any effort, you cannot use technology and expect it to make you better than everyone else. I could use the most expensive Nikon camera and Caitlyn could use a disposable camera and she would still take better pictures than me. Caitlyn knows how to use the camera as a tool to get what she wants, whereas I am sort of clueless about all of it.
Anyway, that’s the story of my digital story. Hope it makes sense.
Photoshop Prompt #10
Jim Groom is…
A MANBABY.
Dear Digital Story Class:
You are welcome. So, so welcome.
Evaluation:
The hardest part of this was the shadows. I couldn’t figure out how to separate the shadow from the object so I had to have layers covering up the shadows that showed up on the sky. I also actually took the kid’s face from a different picture because in this one the shirt was covering up his face. It was from the same set as this picture from Jim’s Flickr. Whatever. I’m not a creeper. I may post a video of how I did this, but I might not.
This is my last Photoshop prompt for this class because I need to pass my other classes. But, I’m keeping this blog so I will probably post more during the summer and beyond.
Final Photoshop Prompt
… is coming. Think Jim Groom + one of his kids = MANBABY.
I worked on the picture for a few hours this morning and I feel okay about it but I am sitting on it for a bit and I’m going to look at it again later.
Get pumped, DS106. Get pumped.
(Photo from Jim’s Flickr)
Show and Tell on Prompt 9
The audio sounds better but I didn’t do anything. Womp womp.
