Poster Draft

I meant to post this last night, sorry guys! This is very much still in the making, but here is what I have so far. It's a poster that could be used for a Navy ship homecoming tent event. The bottom left are some of the food brands that my aunt and uncle's company sell. I am working the most on the top right now, perhaps adding a ribbon or some shape behind the "Welcome Home USS Harry S Truman". The blue and gold colors I am taking from the USS Harry S Truman's crest.

Unit Assignment: Pixlr Fun

I used Pixlr for this unit assignment. I have been using Illustrator for working on my poster but wanted to try a new online tool. I used the opacity option to make the picture more transparent to draw easier on top of the picture. Using the pencil took, I sketched over the sky, ocean, sand, my legs, and my flip flops. I then began to fill in the colors for each aspect of the picture. I used the filter tool to add some “noise” to the sand, to make it have that grainy texture. The picture looks pretty simple, but without having a Wacom tablet, it was actually pretty tricky trying to trace some of the objects. A Wacom tablet would have definitely come in handy for this project. I also added some objects that were not in the original picture. If you look closely in the water, I created some people surfing and waiting for waves in the water. What I like most about this picture is that I can resize it to whatever size without losing any of the resolution, like we have been talking about. Very cool! 

attempt at GIMP

I chose to play around with GIMP to see what type of features it offered and how it compared to photoshop which I am more familiar with using. After spending about half an hour in the program, I found myself very frustrated, I couldnt find some of even the simplest features like the select tool to move layers around, and it took a while to figure out how to add a second layer. The second image below is a screen shot of what I was working on - I was trying to use the Freshmen Parking car icon and play around with numbers and colors - but believe it or not I couldnt even figure out how to get the color palette up.

Publishing the file had limited options from what I could find, all were some form of .xcf file, bzip or gzip, which after googling the uses of - it became apparent you cant do anything with, you have to open it in another software to convert to .jpg or .png. This is very limiting I thought.

Now - as inept as my above post sounds, I do have to say it took hours and days to figure out how to move around and comfortably use the tools in photoshop. In a lot of the same ways I could tell that GIMP has many features and can do a lot of the same things as photoshop. For those without access to ADOBE products, GIMP could be useful with enough time put into it to learn how to properly navigate the features. I didnt have that much luck...

(The blog wouldnt let me upload a .xcf file)

(This is the screen shot of what I was working on trying to manipulate)

Unit Assignment

For the assignment I went out and tried to find a different piece of software form the list. I chose an online drawing software called pencil madness. I thought this was neat because I have zero artistic ability. While this drawing is not great I feel it is leaps and bounds over what I could actually do with a pencil and paper. The software helps assist the drawing to make it look better and more artistic. While a professional user probably would not like this software it can help people who cannot draw seem like they have a little bit more skills than they actually have.