Postcard

Alta is a ski resort in Utah and is one of the favorites of my family. We love to hike there in the summer, ski in the winter, it was the first place we went to when we moved out west, and this is where I taught my boyfriend how to ski. I chose images that I took from all around the mountain and chose the orange because it complimented the blues of the other images and also because this is the shade of orange worn by ski school instructors, so it’s seen all the time. The phrase “ski Alta” is one of the tag lines, similar to “ski Utah” which is like a state motto. The background image was chosen because it has a good balance of the mountain and the sky with the sun shining brilliantly which adds nice emphasis in the top of the image.

The first step taken was adding the text “ALTA” and adjusted the tracking to make the letters closer together. Then using the Warp effect, I adjusted the shape of the text with the Rise option and a low bend percentage. Next I selected the text and used the 3D effect Extrude & Bevel with the x and y rotations set to 10* and z to 0* and the color changed to a gray temporarily. Next I created a copy of the text without the shadows and moved those above the image so that I could create a clipping mask for each letter with it’s own image. Each letter has a unique image so I added the images to the file and resized them to the size of the letters, sent the image behind the letter, and created the clipping mask. Once these four were done, the letters were aligned on top of the letters with shadows. The last steps taken in Illustrator were to add the background image, chose a color for the shadow, added and rotated the text “Ski”, and added a rectangle border around the image. Once completed, the file was exported into Photoshop so as to preserve image resolution. Within that file another image with old postcard texture was added and frequency separation was performed on it in order to isolate that texture information. The texture layer was transformed and rotated from portrait to landscape and resized to fit the postcard image I created.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *