Ink Accident

Well, I found out last Wednesday that my printer was out of ink in a rather dramatic way - I tried to print my collage for class and no black ink appeared! After a few moments of panic, I realized that the collage, or some parts of it at least, actually looked kind of cool. Specifically, the picture of the woman in the lower left corner had white eyes. It looks really creepy. And in the right bottom corner, the shadows of people watching the flag burn look more like ghostly images than just normal shadows. I have examples! But because Preview is stupid, they won't face the right way no matter how many times I rotate and re-save the images. So...tilt your head?



















Although to be fair, I think it's easier to see the shadows from this angle. If the rest of the collage hadn't been even more messed up, I would have been tempted to turn it in like this. These are definitely weird effects that I bet I could reproduce in Photoshop, but I doubt I would have thought to do something like this. So I guess it is a good thing that my ink ran out when it did.

NGO Idea...Maybe?

My first idea for this project was a small group that my high school's National Honor Society worked with my senior year. Unfortunately, I can't remember much about it - no name, no idea where it was located (other than somewhere in Fort Worth), or anything remotely useful. What I DO remember is this:
*It was during Christmas, and the manager made us sing carols as we helped people load up their stuff.
*Each family received a turkey and a bag of canned food. This was what I helped with, and believe me, carrying 20 pounds of frozen turkey outside gets old really fast.
*Families had to sign up to come get things; some just got food, others were able to pick out a certain number of toys for their kids. There were a lot of toy donations crammed into the rooms, which were pretty small.
But that's it. And knowing how unorganized the NHS was, there won't be any records for me to check. So unless someone by some random chance someone out there recognizes this place, I will think of something else. Possibly the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer foundation. I'm familiar with that organization through the TCU Bookstore where I work in the clothing dept. Every year we get a T-shirt to sell. We have cups and lanyards as well. We still have leftover t-shirts from 2008 and 2007 (because the store manager won't let us sell them, but also won't let us get rid of them...grrrr!) so I could get pictures of all those items. That way my project would be really local! There is a location in Dallas, so I don't know that I could just drive over to get any pictures there, so I like the possibility of nearby pictures.

Layers and Photoshop

Like a lot of people in this class, I am already fairly familiar with Photoshop. Having said that, it's been a while since I've used it (almost 3 years I believe) so when we had some class time last Thursday to play around, it took me a while to remember how things work. But I LOVE the Layers book. It is simple and easy to understand. (And the author uses a Mac. What could be better?) Like Karen said, the author even has a website where you can download the pictures he used to make following along even easier. This book really makes me want to buy the Photoshop software so I may have to look into that before the semester ends.
I wish I had some of the projects I created in my high school class where we learned how to use Illustrator, Photoshop and Flash, but all that stuff was saved to our student drives and deleted at the end of the year. The final project we did involved all the software to make a little movie with voice overs, sound clips, animation, original drawings, edited pictures, etc etc. But I bet that after I finish this class I'll be able to make an even better version of that project. So that's one of my goals for this semester.