This project was difficult for me specifically mostly due to the fact of what was being asked versus what I had at my disposal. Some of the steps I either couldn’t work how I wanted it to or didn’t feel right to me with what I had. I decided to use my two photos of CSX #911 and #3194, two of CSX’s special painted honorary units. I then used a photo of Strasburg #90, a steam locomotive currently residing on the Strasburg Railroad in Pennsylvania. I figured that this was a good way to show the rail industry as a whole, a very dirty and black past with a bright and promising future.
Month: March 2021
I would say one of the things that I learned was how to use Adobe InDesign, I had never worked with the program beforehand and I think it can definitely be handy in the future, although I found it a little difficult to work with at the beginning. The easiest part was resizing the images in photoshop for the online portfolio. I think the one thing that could be improved was the photos I took of the different things that I purchased on the trip. They could have been better but given my time constraint I think they came out okay in the end. The one thing that could improve the project for the professor was maybe the explanation of the instructions for what to do, as I found them a little complicated. I think I can use InDesign for future projects (both school and my own) as I find it handy for making PDF style art. What I am impressed with is my level of creativity as I came up with this idea on my own and had no outside inspiration for this one.
Using the process of image masks is something I am definitely familiar with, yet doing them in these format was a different experience entirely. Using the magnetic lasso tool helped out an immense amount, and would say that was the easiest to accomplish, the hardest being trying to use the final option and getting into the finer details with trying to mask hair. I’m still not 100% on it, but I think I can be better over time.