Word Art

For my word art, I chose to put the word 'Lily' into the shape of an actual lily.  The way I did it was I took a photo I had of a lily, and put the words over top, and shaped them to the photo to get the actual shape of a lily.  I also arched some of the words and made the fonts become smaller so I could get the real look of a pedal.  I decided to use spring colours as well to go with the whole flower theme.  Then in the end, I took the photo out from underneath and got a lily, made out of the word 'Lily'.  To save time with this project, I just duplicated the layers, rotated and skewed each one to the way I wanted it to fit the shape of the photo, and changed the font sizes and colours too.

Pig Art

CD Cover - Eminem "Lose Yourself"

For my CD cover, I chose to a cover for Eminem, naming the album one of his songs, "Lose Yourself".  The background of my cover relates to my artist because Eminem wrote the song "Lose Yourself" for the movie he filmed based on his life called "8 Mile".  8 mile in Detroit  is where he's from, and the whole song is basically about how he starting rapping in underground competitions before he became famous.  His neighbourhood was a "ghetto" area, so I thought my background suited the whole underground and "ghetto" feel, especially with the graffiti.  I also put a spray paint cloud behind my album title to add to this.

Triptych of Lilys

For my triptych, I wanted up close flowers because I think they are cool to look at up close and see the texture and lines on the pedals and the insides are intriguing.  I wanted to make them look really different from the original photos, but decided to keep them like this because it looks like light is coming through the pedals.  First, I went into the brush strokes effects and put a filter onto the photos called accented edges.  Then I changed the saturation to 60, the contrast to 20, and the brightness to 17.  To add the final touch, I went into the artistic effects and put another filter on the photos called rough pastels.

One World Living Together - Mulitcultural Festival 2011

I believe my poster is suited for this event because I've got a photo of the world in someone's hands giving a feel of all of us being together in these hands, and no one is outside of the hands because we all live together in our world.  I've also got a lot of ethnic diversity in the faces I have chosen to represent our many cultures in our world: Asian, African-American, Caucasian, Indian, Mexican/Spanish, Bi-racial, etc.  I added the peace symbol too, to represent that we all live together in peace with eachother, not all places have world peace, but it's what we hope to have one day, the whole world in peace.  Finally, I chose to make the letters rainbow colours to represent the many colours in our society.  

Keith Hawkins - 4

Keith Hawkins - 3

Keith Hawkins - 2

Keith Hawkins

Photojournalism Ethics

     Personally, I think the subject of the photo has the right to the photo, not the photographer.  I think all photographers should have some sort of permission to take pictures of whoever their subject is because paparazi take photos without permission and most of the photos taken by them are unflattering, taken during personal moments, and are almost always photos that the subject would not want seen by the public.  I think pictures that are taken need to be related to the article they are put with so that the media doesn't present a misleading message by using a photo that sends the wrong message when paired with the text.  I also think that photographers should not alter the images because it is unfair to represent someone as something they are not, just to entertain the public or go along with a rumour to make it look true.  The only photos that should be altered, are touch ups done to a photo shoot to make the photo look better, but not too extreme to make the photo look nothing like the subject anymore, for example making the subject look way too skinny.  I also think that photographers should try and get the best picture of the subject, not the worst.  Finally, all photos should be approved by the subject whether the photographer already had permission to take the picture, no matter what photo they have, or if they altered the photo even in the slightest way from a photo shoot, the photo should be approved by the subject before printing the photo(s) in media and releasing them to the public for everyone to see.

Vote Poster #2

My second poster is also an appropriate design for this purpose because, again, the posters are supposed to appeal to teenagers, and an iPod touch is one of the major media devices that all teenagers own.  It may not be an iPod touch that they have, but almost every teenager has an iPod of some kind, or an mp3 player.  I changed the song list on the iPod to tell teenagers to vote, and all different reasons why they should.

Vote Poster #1

My first poster is an appropriate design for this purpose because since our posters are supposed to speak out to teenagers and get them to vote, I took a picture of a person at the end of a tunnel with light and their arms spred out to symbolize the "whole other world out there" sentence on my poster.  I wrote "vote" in graffiti letters because I feel it appeals to a younger audience because graffiti is done by teenagers, not older people.  The last part is I wrote "feel ignored in society?" and "to be a part of it and see it your way" because young adults/teens do not have a big influence or voice in society so their opinions are usually ignored, but if they participate in the vote, they can see their society the way they want to because they voted for the candidate they think has the same opinions as them, values that they would like to have in society and   basically represent their voice and be the action to their views.

My Thoughts, My Expressions, My Poetry

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I chose the image of the teenage boy standing on a cliff for two reasons, one, it is teenage poetry that is going into this book so the cover should reflect that and two, because it looks like he is thinking, which is what I wanted to represent the "my thoughts" portion of the title.  The next image above "my expressions" was chosen to reflect that portion of the title as well. Then the last image was chosen to go with the entire thing and the "my poetry" portion of the title.  The whole idea of these images is the biggest one is the boy thinking about going cliff diving, something he would like to experience, the second is to actually go cliff jumping and actually jump which would be an expression of his thought because he actually did it, and the last image is him in the water after jumping because now he's had the experience of cliff diving and can write poetry on his experience.  For example about how it felt and what he was thinking and feeling while cliff jumping.  I changed all the images into a blue pallet to go with the water, and I changed the opacity of the smaller images to show the though or the memory.  The whole image is purposely out of focus to reflect the whole thought process because thoughts aren't always clear.

Nicki Minaj - sketched and coloured up

Eminem - sketched and coloured up

Christina Aguleria - sketched and coloured

Birdman - sketched and coloured up

                              

Colour Screwed

I wanted her to do this pose because the heat coming from the vent was creating a kind of wind that was blowing her hair, and I told her to make that face because I thought it went well with the pose.  I knew i wanted the glasses to stay black so I cut them out and layer copied them and erased the edges and changed them to a filter called glowing edges and adjusted the intesity of it effect to make the relfection in the glasses stand out.  I didn;t want the same gradient over the entire picture vbecause I wanted tones of colour in this picture because I thought it was the perfect picture to change the colour of.  I layer copied the clothing and erased the edges and made the clothes the rainbow gradient.  Then I layer copied the lips and erased around the edges and changed the hue and saturation of them to match the pink on the clothing.  Finally, I changed the rest of the picture to the orange gradient because I thought it went best with the rest of the picture.

Dancing Is Life

From the beginning, I wanted her to do a pose like this to kind of recreate the iPod commercial kind of look without having to use an iPod in the photo.  I couldn't figure out another way to make her look kind of like a silhouette like the commercial but keep detail on her, so I just used the filter called glowing edges in the stylize effects and darkened it.  I thought a plain background looked too boring against what she looked like now so I used a gradient as the background to make it more interesting.  I thought these colours of the gradient matched better with her instead of red and orange.

Those Amazing Blue Eyes

For this photo, I cropped it to kind of bring her closer.  I played with a lot of the contrast, hue, saturation and brightness in this photo.  I kind of lost detail in the bottom left cornor of her shirt so I cut the part I wanted and layer copied it and played with the lighting and shadows to make the detail come back a little.  I found a really nice blue eye that I liked the colour of and made it the same size as her original eye and then replaced it to make it look like her own.  I chose to use this picture because I wanted to change her eye from the beginning and I told her to do this pose so that I could show off her big pretty eyes in a way that is more attention grabbing rather than without the glasses because the whole pose bring attention to her eyes.  I also used a filter effect from brush strokes called dark strokes on the photo.

Just To Be Alone

This photo is cropped, and again, edited while converting the picture to black and white.  This one is my second favourite black and white portrait, next to the one with the tattoo and guitar because I love the way I made her look from editing it, especially the skin.  I made a few more black and white portraits and edited them as well, but I didn't think they were as good as these ones.  I wanted her to sit like this because I knew she could pull off looking sad.  I chose for her to sit on the stairs because I thought it made her look like she went somewhere to be alone.  Her arms looked better in that position rather than holding her head up, and I took the photo from a sort of above angle to make her look like she was looking down more.

That Serious Kind Of News

This photo took forever to take of the girls because they are two of my best friends and they could not stop laughing at each other, it was almost impossible to get them to be serious.  I cropped this photo and edited the black and white effect the same way I did for my other photos, when you convert it to black and white, add or lessen red, green, or blue.  In doing this, it made the light on the wall brighter and makes the entire picture look better than the original version.  I told them to sit in this pose because I wanted them to look like one just told the other some really upsetting or shocking news that was about to change a lot in their lives.  I chose for them to sit against the wall because I liked the way it looked behind them and I think is shows their age, meaning you know they are teenagers in school.

My Guitar Gets Me Through Everything

This photo used to have a background.  She was sitting on the floor, so the floor and the wall were in the background.  I took the background out with a clone stamp so the lines on the wall and floor would not be a distraction.  The black and white in this photo was edited.  When I changed the photo to black and white, there are buttons to add or lessen red, green, and blue so I used those tools to get the photo to look like this.  It isn't much of a difference but it looks better than the original.  I used my other friend's guitar from earlier for this photo because I wanted her to look sad and kind of look like she was hiding behind the guitar.

Cure CF

For this photo, it is the same as my first one, but cropped to get more of a focal point instead of the face as a possible distraction.

Guitar Playing Hero

For this photo, I really liked the pose and how the tattoo was so clear so I tried to make that part of my focal point.  In the other pictures you will see, I edited the black & white look of the photo, but I did absolutely nothing to this one because I liked it so much.  I saw my friend in the hall playing guitar, and just looking at him I got this idea for this pose.

Digital Lanscape - Filtered

After I finished my original digital landscap, I took it and flattened the image by going into layer on the tool bar to make all the layers become one so I could change the look of the entire picture.  After that, I clicked on the filter section on the tool bar and went into artistic and started playing around with the effects and found that this one looked the best and it is called rough pastels.  As it turns out, I like the look of this one better than the original.

Digital Landscape

For this project, I picked a backgroup picture from outter space that had a kind of collision supernova kind of design because I knew I wanted the sun and the moon to look like they were touching.  I went into enhance on the tool bar and started playing with the colour of the background and changed it to this.  I used the eliptical marquee tool and used the circle to cut out the sun and the moon and placed them where I wanted, so the explosion part looked like it was in the middle behind them.  The sun was too bright and looked really out of place so I went into enhance again and changed the brightness and contrast.  I just used the eraser tool to erase the background from the girl and I rotated her a bit to look like she was floating and being pulled by the balloons.  Originally, she was a different colour that didn't match the scene at all or look realistic so again, I went into enhance and adjusted the hue and saturation of her to make the colour of her match and make her skin tone look as real as I could without her looking weird.  I also made the colour of her balloons sort of match the background by using these effects as well.