Assignment (Visual) 13: Take a concept, one word, and plug it into Flickr and take the first 50 images and average them using Photoshop or similar program.

I was inspired by a graceful, though fuzzy image of a jellyfish grabbed from a friend’s underwater footage. In my mind’s eye, I could see the jellyfish replicated so that it appeared to leave an effervescent trail as it floated toward the viewer.

That didn’t happen.

Everything went swimmingly until I discovered the environmental map and imagined how cool it would be to have a source of light in the image — one that cut through the darkness and illuminated the jellyfish. Two hours later, I was really in deep water. So deep that I started taking a protocol in hopes of learning from the ordeal. Here’s a sample:

6:56 Somehow can’t get back to light effects.
6:57 Realized how to turn off color tools. Select move tool.
6:58 Cannot add environmental map again. Better to abort. Deleted all.

Believe me. It was not easy to delete all that work but I felt confident that I had learned enough the I could redo what I’d done right and avoid the pitfalls that got me into my untenable situation.

The gamble paid off. I remembered the basic process and made some improvements along the way. But, it’s still not the jellyfish trailing efferevesence.

So I’ll just call it my “jamfish” that teaches me to deal with the frustration of not being able to realize my vision but keep the faith that someday I will.

Assignment (Visual) 560: Warhol Something.

It’s fun to think what Warhol may have done with digital and social networking tools. I can see a mash-up of Four Square and his famous Warhol effect with maybe each square placing the image in a different location.

Nothing so interesting with my first Warhol effect. I did use GIMP to create my first and then tried a “toy” on the BigHugeLabs site to generate the poster. I learned from the machine-generated Warholizer that a more abstract effect is more appealing — and takes 20 years off!

Assignment (Visual) 191: Demotivational Posters

I’ve been around long enough to remember Steven Covey’s first edition, Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. I think there may be eight now so I’m sure that missing one is why I failed. Or that the bureaucracy tried to cram effectiveness training down our throats.

Covey’s work, I’m sure, led to the first wave of motivational posters. So I get some degree of adverse pleasure in creating my first demotivational poster.

Disclaimer: The quote is not mine but was identified as anonymous every place I saw it on the Web so no one gets credit. I would like to thank Fletchy182, somewhere in Germany, for sharing some fun photos of his first dive. There are no during or post shots, so I’ll just hope he was successful on his first try.

I had noted that Marcey recommended PixMonkey and I checked it out and decided that my old standby PowerPoint would serve this purpose well. I’ve done my share of PowerPoint dissing but for simple designs that you can save as jpegs this tool works just great. No need to bring in the high-powered programs. Besides, I find that when working with teachers, many of them tech nubies like me, that the sight of a familiar tool can be comforting.

While checking out PixMonkey, I came across a set of “toys” for visual editing that has such potential for making many of these visual assignments quick and easy for everyone. Yes, I realize that part of the motivation is to learn new tools, but for K-12 teachers who want first to focus on some fun, clever activities and later on tools, BigHugeLab is a real find. I’ll be sure to share.

Here’s my BigHugeLab-generated demotivational poster. I like that the photo stretches across the poster though it was severely cropped. Also, like the double mat look that would take me some extra time to accomplish.