For anyone that missed writing this down:

Homework – BLOG

List 5 things that you have learned (photo-shop) from assessment 1.

Post all 3 concept boards on blog explain which board communicates your concept & why

Bring To Class Next Week: 1 DDS Scan (Shirt Scan)

For photo-shop in the concept board work I spent a LOT of time on the net. This sounds like I didn’t have much work happening but it was really great actually. I’ve never felt like the Internet had much to offer for skilled education. But Youtube, font books, and brush books, blogs – all of these became very important for me to produce my concept boards in the best way I could.

Firstly I re-learned the pen tool, the method is still not as good it could be, but at least now I understand the concept and I can move a little quicker. The tutorials on Youtube for pen tool vary a lot but they are all somewhat useful if you keep watching.

I needed pen tool for the pictures in the collage and the creative, the collage just didn’t look right with the pictures stuck as squares, as Igloos are domed and needed to communicate this.

Then I taught myself how to find and import new brushes and fonts, I know we also covered this in class but now I actually know what I’m doing and I’ve found a few sites that suit me. For brushes I really loved this one:

http://www.photoshopsupport.com/tools/brushes.html

There are tutorials, beautiful brushes (which is where my aurora borealis on the creative board came from) and it is a well set out website, which makes it feel a little more safe than the ones with flashing advertisements blaring at your eyes.

Then learnt how to blend colour, not very well until the end but I learnt what the Burn Tool, the Smudge Tool and the Eraser Tool all can do and where they are useful - AND where they aren’t J

I used all of these to try to gain more synergy between the picture layers on my creative; they weren’t working for me though. I tried the pain brush to just recolor but this was also a problem. And so I then discovered the clone stamp tool and my world had changed forever!! There is a fantastic tutorial for it on Youtube with a woman showing how to use it on water with a picture of a rowing team – definitely worth watching. The way it works is incredible, taking pixels from one spot and cloning them in another. This meant that all my mistakes were a little less worse for wear. It was hard to get a hang of as it is easy to want to just keep going and not worry about when the pixels are matching a different area but once you’ve got used to going back and re-sampling it can look amazing.

The next best thing I learnt was a complete accident, I was trying to erase a label in the bottom corner of the creative without having to crop it when I stumbled upon the Magic Eraser Tool, which I clicked twice on the Inuit Child (I was on the wrong layer as well, which may have had something to do with the fact that I couldn’t get rid of the label.) Et Voila! She was hazy and broken looking, and blended on the ice perfectly. This is exactly what I wanted to convey as the fact that the Inuit were native to the land, a part of it, and that each entity communicated to the other.