For the third project of the semester, we were presented with the task of turning a metaphor into an image. In other words, we had to implement some sort of symbolic meaning into an image. My main focus was the phrase fishing for compliments, mainly to focus on the negative impact that social media may have on self image. Most social media services have some sort of feature implemented to rate content. The sad reality is that some people take these concepts very personally to determining their own self worths. It’s something that I feel is an issue, so that was the underlying idea of the image created.

Combining the images was something that I found fairly easy. For practice, I always used to do this exact process, and it introduced me to the importance of color correction in merging images. Tools such as curves or levels are second nature to me now, thanks to exactly this. My biggest challenge was avoiding making the image too repetitive. I resolved this by using varying like buttons to represent multiple services. I heard a great idea to improve the image during the critique, although I didn’t implement it, which was to include some sort of bait on the fishing line. I felt like it would look too out of place, but the concept was interesting.

I think that the assignment is great and doesn’t need much adjustment. It’s fun to mess around with this new generation verb of “photoshopping” images together. Photoshop itself includes some tools that are perfect for this exact task of merging images, my favorite one being Select and Mask which I just recently learned. These tools that I learn are definitely useful when it comes to working on future tasks. As for inspiration, I used to watch TONS of timelapses on YouTube when it came to work like this. Unfortunately, I have no idea what the titles were as they were made so long ago, but they would take such a simple image of a landscape and turn it into artwork with some sort of theme. It was really inspirational, and they really introduced me to the power of digital artwork.