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This image is a recreation of a dream that I had when I was much younger. In it, there were two apples that, for some reason, my sisters and I needed to protect at all costs. Later on in the dream, we decided to eat the apples and discovered that the reason we had to protect them was because instead of cores, the apples had strawberries in the middle. After that, we ate the apples around the strawberry part and used the strawberries as light bulbs for our house.

In the completed image, I tried to show a progression of the different events that occurred in the dream. There’s a regular apple on the table, and an apple with a bite revealing part of a strawberry held in someone’s hand above. Above that, there’s a strawberry hanging from a cord like a light would hang from the ceiling. The most difficult part was trying to get the images to look like they belonged together, and to do this I applied a few blended color filters in between the layers of objects.

 

Process:

  

This is the image that I used to get the whole, uneaten apple on the table.

    

I chose another image of an apple with a cut in it, erased the middle part, and edited it around a picture of a strawberry to look like the strawberry was inside the apple. This was pretty challenging to do, but I think it looked alright in the end.

 

For the background, I erased the hanging light that was originally in the photo and replaced it with an image of a different strawberry. At the same time, I added in the other images and their shadows, and played with their placement to get the composition to look better. I ended up moving the strawberry-apple up in the image to be held in a person’s hand, which I thought would make the image a bit more interesting overall.

The item I chose to represent me is an americano that my friend ordered when we were in Korea. I chose this because of how often I would go to cafes there either by myself or with friends and how much I enjoyed trying different types of coffee and other drinks. It became so much a part of my everyday life there, largely because of the incredible prevalence of coffee shops in Seoul and because of how socially acceptable it was to spend most of your time going to them.

Andy Warhol seemed to explore several main ideas through his artwork. One of them was how we could take everyday objects and by examining them more closely, find new meaning in them. He also liked to subvert our expectations by placing ordinary things where we wouldn’t normally see them. By doing this, he created advertisements that resonated with people in new ways – focusing so closely on the products themselves that we as consumers are forced to consider them, and perhaps even think about them in a way we hadn’t before. I think his ideas on popular culture are very accurate – how many times has something ordinary blown up simply because some people thought of using it in a different way than was conventionally acceptable (looking at you, Tide pods)? Popular culture is determined by the people, and we as a society can choose to give attention to whatever we want, regardless of its objective importance in real life.

I think that my item has a strong relationship to popular culture, at least in Korea. In Seoul, new cafes and cafe trends are very important to the cultural scene among young people – it’s a very popular hobby to go visit the newest and hottest coffee shops to take pictures and post them on Instagram. And often, younger workers would buy coffee for their senior company members as a sign of friendliness and appreciation. The americano my friend bought is just a small object symbolic of a whole culture of cafe-going and coffee-buying that exists in Korea.

In the way that Warhol used machines to automate his artwork, I feel as though we’re doing much the same in this class with PS and Illustrator. While there is merit to using traditional mediums of art, digital art has certainly taken tasks such as advertisement creating to new levels of ease and efficiency. I think learning these technologies has definitely given me a new perspective on the things you can accomplish with digital art that you couldn’t with traditional mediums.

Elements of Art

Line

A line is formed by a moving point that creates a path which often causes the eye to follow it.

Shape

Shape is the contour that defines a two-dimensional object.

Color

Color is the effect produced when light strikes an object and is reflected back to the viewer’s eye.

Value

Value is how light or dark an object appears.

Form

Form is a property of three-dimensional objects that have depth.

Texture

 

Texture is how the surface of an object appears to the touch, which can be suggested in two-dimensional images.

Space

Space is defined as the area either taken up by an object or the area surrounding it.

 

Principles of Design

Balance

Balance is the sense of symmetry an object or image has, determined by a distribution of equal visual weight throughout all or part of the image.

Contrast

Contrast is the effect achieved when opposing elements in an image exist in a way that accentuates their difference.

Emphasis

Emphasis is achieved when there is a clear focus on one or more elements that draws the eye or attention of the viewer to that element.

Movement

Movement is a contrived or natural path of motion in an image that leads the eye of the viewer in a certain direction.

Pattern

Pattern is an arrangement of repeated elements in an image laid out in an ordered manner.

Proportion

Proportion is the noticeable difference in scale between objects that defines the relationship between them.

Alignment (Repetition)

Alignment is a repetition or arrangement of elements which forms a straight line.

Unity

Unity is the arrangement of all visual elements in an image in a way that creates a sense of harmony and balance of the elements.

My second geometric landscape collage! This was the most time-consuming but most rewarding assignment out of the ones we did, I think. I also made a version with texture filters.

In this blog post, I will explain the six blend modes in Photoshop, accompanied by example images.

Normal Blending Modes

Normal (Original Images)

  

This is the mode where the overlying layer remains untouched – all pixels are opaque and the top image completely covers the bottom one.

Dissolve (50% Opacity)

Dissolve also doesn’t change the image except for the opacity of the top layer, which reveals some of the bottom layer depending on the chosen opacity.

Darken Blending Modes

Darken

Darken takes the base or blend color and depending which is the darker one, keeps that color as the result.

Multiply

This multiplies the base color by the blend color, and this always results in a darker color.

Color Burn

This increases the contrast between the base and blend colors which reduced highlights and saturates midtones.

Linear Burn

This decreases the brightness of the base color based on the value of the blend color, and produces the most contrast in darker colors than the other darken blending modes.

Darker Color

This compares the total of all channel values for the blend and base color and displays the lower value color.

 

Lighten Blending Modes

Lighten

This selects the lighter of the base and blend colors to use in the resulting color.

Screen

This multiplies the inverse of the base and blend colors, always resulting in a lighter color.

Color Dodge

Brightens the base color to reflect the blend color by decreasing contrast between the two.

Linear Dodge (Add)

Brightens the base color to reflect the blend color by increasing the brightness.

Lighter Color

Compares the total of all channel values for the blend and base color and displays the higher value color.

 

Contrast Blending Modes

Overlay

Multiplies or screens the colors, depending on the base color. Preserves the highlights and shadows of the base color and mixes it with the blend color to reflect the lightness or darkness of the original color.

Soft Light

Darkens or lightens the colors, depending on the blend color. If the blend color is lighter than 50% gray, the image is lightened as if it were dodged. If the blend color is darker than 50% gray, the image is darkened.

Hard Light

Multiplies or screens the colors, depending on the blend color. If the blend color is lighter than 50% gray, the image is lightened, as if it were screened. This is useful for adding highlights to an image. If the blend color is darker than 50% gray, the image is darkened

Vivid Light

Burns or dodges the colors by increasing or decreasing the contrast, depending on the blend color. If the blend color is lighter than 50% gray, the image is lightened by decreasing the contrast. If the blend color is darker than 50% gray, the image is darkened by increasing the contrast.

Linear Light

Burns or dodges the colors by decreasing or increasing the brightness, depending on the blend color. If the blend color is lighter than 50% gray, the image is lightened by increasing the brightness. If the blend color is darker than 50% gray, the image is darkened by decreasing the brightness.

Pin Light

Replaces the colors, depending on the blend color. If the blend color is lighter than 50% gray, pixels darker than the blend color are replaced, and pixels lighter than the blend color do not change. If the blend color is darker than 50% gray, pixels lighter than the blend color are replaced, and pixels darker than the blend color do not change.

Hard Mix

Adds the red, green and blue channel values of the blend color to the RGB values of the base color. If the resulting sum for a channel is 255 or greater, it receives a value of 255 and if less than 255, a value of 0.

 

Inversion Blending Modes

Difference

Looks at the color information in each channel and subtracts either the blend color from the base color or the base color from the blend color, depending on which has the greater brightness value.

Exclusion

Creates an effect similar to but lower in contrast than the Difference mode. Blending with white inverts the base color values. Blending with black produces no change.

Subtract

Looks at the color information in each channel and subtracts the blend color from the base color. In 8- and 16-bit images, any resulting negative values are clipped to zero.

Divide

Looks at the color information in each channel and divides the blend color from the base color.

 

Component Blending Modes

Hue

Creates a result color with the luminance and saturation of the base color and the hue of the blend color.

Saturation

Creates a result color with the luminance and hue of the base color and the saturation of the blend color.

Color

Creates a result color with the luminance of the base color and the hue and saturation of the blend color. This preserves the gray levels in the image.

Luminosity

This creates a result color with the hue and saturation of the base color and the luminance of the blend color.

This is the Tiny World image I made. Both of the pictures I used, the panorama and the one of myself, were taken when I studied abroad in South Korea last semester. That semester, more than anything, taught me that location is absolutely not limited by geography. I definitely feel a lot of the time that even though I am physically back in Ohio, a huge part of myself still lives in Seoul with everyone I met there. The space that I made for myself in Korea was unlike any I’ve occupied before in my life. Now, thinking back to it, I’m always brought back to the feelings of warmth and excitement that every day brought when I explored the country with the close friends I made there.

The experience of editing this image was both enjoyable and frustrating at different times. Following the tutorial gave me a satisfying sense of checking things off a list as I edited the image, but since the image of myself was not taken from above like in the tutorial, I don’t think that I achieved quite the same effect in the end, which was a bit unfortunate. However, looking at this image still immediately takes me back to two different places I loved being in in Korea, so I’m happy I could take the panorama and picture of myself and turn them into something new that still represents my experience last semester.

Part 1 – Lava Field

Here is my first edited version of “Lava Field”. In it, I chose to replace the plants growing in the rocks with water from another image, and the sky with a different image’s sky. What gave me the most trouble by far was when I realized I hadn’t properly erased the parts I wanted to erase from the original image. This caused parts from the background to peek through into the other layers and added a lot more difficulty overall until I finally determined how to fix it. However, the whole process helped me become very well-acquainted with the Magic Wand selection tool, which is a useful skill to have for future projects, I think.

Edited versions –

Posterize:

Greyscale:

Invert:

 

Part 2 – Freckles and Tattoos

This is my edited version of “Freckles and Tattoos”. I became very familiar with the healing and stamp tools here. The overall image took me a very long time to edit and was pretty difficult. This was mainly because the editing left the woman’s skin tone still looking fairly speckled and uneven even after removing the freckles and tattoos. It was difficult trying to get rid of the random lighter spots without erasing the texture of her skin, so I kind of gave it my best effort and stopped after a while. I like how the new background fits with the image a lot though.

   

Today in class I followed a Youtube tutorial on how to change the colors of objects in Photoshop. This was my first time ever using Photoshop so there was a bit of a learning curve, but I’m still pretty happy with how the picture turned out. It was also really cool and super fun to do!