Saturday, October 2, 2010

Reflections on Scratchin'

Help me, Mr. Wizard!!!  And in answer, no soothing voice saying, "Tooter, tooter, tooter.  Drizzle, drazzle, drazzle, drone, time for this one to come home."  Oy!!!  I am left adrift in a lonely boat, oarless, a fish out of water gulping, gasping for air.  Criminy, Wendy.  Get over yourself.  It's just Photoshop!  But, but, but I don't know this stuff...I'm technologically challenged.  When I got out of Cal Poly (as a Mechanical Engigeeker, not an artist nor computer whiz), there was no internet.  Heck, I just learned how to cut and paste!  And now I have to blog, too?  What the heck is a blog?  And, jeez, I'm not so sure I want to do something that sounds like that.  Stop.  Chill.  These young whippersnappers will help you.  Whew.  Breathe.  Okay.  No matter that it took the whole first class session just to get the paint brush to work... which is why, I suspect, it is my favorite photo shop gadget -- I got it to work first. 

Then the eraser.  Ah, I do like that tool!  With the eraser in the right hand and the paint brush in the left, so to speak, I am well enough equipped to actually scratch out some simple shapes of not so many flat colors.  The goal:  click on every side bar item and see what it does.  Give up on following what is being done on the 'big screen' in lecture or lab as it's moving too fast.  This is perfectly fine. I'm a smart cookie.  Spend the additional time necessary to play with the tools.  And so, game plan in place, learned how to use the lasso tool, but not quite yet getting the difference between all three lassos.  Learned how to move cut out shapes intra-layer and inter-layer, how to rotate images, how to use layers to change certain shapes without affecting others, how to use the rectangle/ellipse tool, how to use the pen tool...and a lot more.  What I have definitely not figured out yet is the razor/slice tool.  Couldn't get it do to one dag-blasted thing in any predictable manner!  Obviously, more experimentation is needed.

My completed work:  Three items, saved as jpegs (what does that even mean?).  My first piece focused on just figuring out layers and the different paint brushes.  I was so excited to have finally gotten something done, I saved it.  The second piece, I tried out some text and some cutting.  And the third, more cutting, more moving. When I was happy with each item's appearance, I guessed I was done.  But, there is so much more to learn!  And it is all so exciting!  I'm thinking I may have developed a gill or a lung, depending on just which medium outside of Kansas I've landed in.

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