Here, I decided to grab a picture of Sean McGloughlin (Jacksepticeye) for Lab 1. I had a great time making these, even if they were a bit extensive.

I learned more about the Mixer Brush tool than I thought I ever would, mostly because I don’t deal with much digital art that requires it. However, I found that it’s a fantastic tool for different jobs and that it’s malleable for many settings.

In my opinion, making the sketch and trying out different filters were simple and engaging activities in the lab. I already love messing around with filters in other programs, but I just found it fun to do all over again.

Planning out and designing the brush and smudge image was the most arduous activity in the bunch, giving me the idea of covering an entire image as a time-consuming task.

I suppose, to ease the burden on myself, I should have chosen a smaller image to go through the activity. That way, I can come up with the same quality in a shorter amount of time.

Perhaps next time, the assignment could also call for fewer filters for us to try out, expand the limit of brush size for the “brush and smudge paint,” or remove the “Connect the Dots” activity for the sake of time conservation.

I see myself using these features in future assignments for designing large-scale backgrounds or textures in video games or rendered productions where detail isn’t highly-regarded but needs a slight touch-up for presentation and aesthetic.

Regarding my previous line art inspired me to work harder to accomplish the arrangement of details in the sketch version of the picture, as I could understand the importance of features and the leniency of sketches in their own right.

These images of my water bottle are both taken from my phone, but the first of the two was taken with the phone’s selfie camera. My biggest note of the difference between the two shots is that the sharpness is much greater in the front camera, where the selfie camera feels softer, and doesn’t differentiate well between shapes that are further away.

Now to look at something up close…

My second observation between the two cameras comes from this set, with a magazine from my house’s newspaper shelf. I noticed that the selfie camera adds some sheen of light that doesn’t show up from the front camera. I’m guessing that the selfie camera is more generalized to deal with all kinds of light, where the front camera has the capabilities to adjust to different situations and help improve the quality.

These four images follow the scan instructions for the lab, and I can see that the clearest difference between all of them is the size that each of them takes, thanks to the resolution that they all share. I admit, WordPress helps to show this difference because of the resolution it tries to keep. Thanks to my home scanner, each image is also cropped precisely to the size it needs to be to show all the content, emphasizing the difference.

Finally, there’s this small flower sketch that I used in a photo editing program. I gave these dimensions to the image since there’s nothing very lavish about the image itself, but I figured it should have a good ratio and orientation to offset its mundanity.

As for the pixels in Part 1 (first image), I imagined that there should be a sense of covering all coloristic bases, and in this case, I chose a broad selection, not taking specifically from any shade, hue, or tint. As for the background in Part 2 (second image), I thought the deep red of the apple would act harshly on the eyes, so I took from the light that shines off it and added a lighter color that also has a kinder saturation.

From what I remember, Photoshop often utilizes rasterization as part of its transforming program. When I went to transform the pixels into a larger image, Photoshop didn’t account for the colors to be transformed as vectors, and created a compromise between compression and contrast.

These images could be used for advertising of some kind. I’m not completely confident on the type, but perhaps it could add an aesthetic edge to give the intended audience a viewpoint for the product by taking the image into account.

As for creating more imagery from scratch, there are plenty more ways, such as line art, gradient blending, and abstract clipping using the lasso tool. The list for potentials includes, but is not limited to, these techniques.