I went to India last summer, and I was able to travel to many tourist destinations in India. I’ve always wanted to visit the Taj Mahal, and it has always been in my bucket list to see it in person. The Taj Mahal is located in Agra, which is about a few hours away from India’s capital, New Dehli. I chose Agra as the place I wanted to use for photo card because I wanted my own memorabilia of this place. This place will always be memorable for me. I played around with the Warp and Extrude & Bevel tools to modify the tilts of the text and adjusting the shadow. I removed the test from the shadow to place the image of the Taj Mahal in the letters.I tried my best to align the letters across the Taj Mahal through the clipping mask in Illustrator. I tried to align the side pillars in the A’s, and put the main structure into the G and the R. I chose the shadow of the text to be red so the letters stand out, and red reminds me of royalty and love, which is what the Taj Mahal represents.
The background image is taken from a fort that is located behind the Taj Mahal. There is supposed to be a body of water in between the fort and the Taj Mahal, but because of the extreme heat, all the water dried up. If you look more closely, there is so much dry land and heat that is able to be seen in the image. Also, the white marble that makes up the Taj Mahal is losing its color due to pollution, so it’s not as white as it is supposed to be. I put the letters AGRA right on top of where the Taj Mahal is located in the background image. I chose this background image because it’s a different, atypical view of the Taj Mahal and it provides a different perspective about one of the 7 Wonders of the World.
I applied the old paper image over the post card image in Photoshop by doing a partial frequency separation. I applied a gaussian blur to the color layer, but I ended up only keeping the texture layer to give the photo card the effect of looking like paper. I also tried adjusting the blending mode on the layers to give the postcard different effects.