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QUESTIONS-

1. What did you learn?

This project, different from the previous two, dealt more with images rather than vector shapes. When working on this assignment, I learned quite a bit about Photoshop, such as using different filters, layer masks, and various tools such as Magnetic Lasso Tool and Eraser Tool to remove a background from an image.

2. What was easy?

The only thing I considered to be easy in this project was importing the images and adjusting the light using the “curves” feature. This allowed me to have a lower brightness and contrast, which suites my theme quite well. I also was able to tint a few of the images to once again, capture that “dark and gritty” appeal of my project.

3. What was challenging?

There were a few components of this project that gave me a hard time. The first being the metaphor. While many common metaphors exist and are recognized by a number of people, I wanted to find something that was original and revealing, so “Money is the Root of all Evil” came into to my mind. The other difficult task was to illustrate the money serving as the roots. This was quite tedious and the section I put most of my time into. Having to duplicate each dollar bill wasn’t so bad, but getting them to align in fashion, that was a different story.

4. How could your submission be improved?

I feel that for this project, I could’ve spent more time on layering the dollar bills and add a “root-like” appearance to them, as while I don’t think it looks horrible, it could definitely appear a bit more “realistic”, but I just didn’t find the time to do this. On a second thought, instead of using Napoleon as one of the dictators, I probably should’ve picked someone else such as Hitler, however I wanted to add some variety, and still felt that Napoleon wasn’t all good, carrying out some malicious attacks and betrayals

5. How could I improve the assignment for the next class?

If I were to take another crack at this assignment, I would focus even more time on the root part, since that to me is the most important part of portraying this metaphor. I might also add more of a “vignette” style to the two dictators, those being Stalin and Napoleon, to make them “float”, as I was originally going for a “ghost” effect, but couldn’t reproduce it well in my project.

6. How might you apply your knowledge in future assignments or work scenarios?

In future tasks or a job setting, removing backgrounds, although a fairly novice, yet crucial skill can come in handy whenever working on a project where you want to make an image out of multiple pictures. Also, using tints, color-correction, and layer masks serve as useful tools when it comes to photo editing.

7. How did a specific reading or video inspire or help you?

For this project, the only thing that really inspired my idea was some research. Everything else, from the trees and evil figures, came to my mind separately. At the time of the “brainstorming phase”, I was thinking about create a mind map, but I figured that since this metaphor is fairly self-explanatory, I decided that it would be best to use my original blueprint, that turning out as my final product. Looking back though, I regret not drawing a mind map since it probably would’ve influenced more creativity and variation in this assignment, but i am still satisfied with the result.

Just as a side note, I know that we were supposed to use a pattern, but I decided to not include mine since I felt that it didn’t suite my project as well as I thought it would.