School – The Beehive

May 26, 2011

Photoshop Fun

As my friend Ginger once wrote, “I have really let my blog go!” I guess it just hasn’t been at the top of my priority list lately, and I apologize profusely to the two of you.

Anyway, I have been taking a design class that includes some basic Photoshop skills as part of it, and I thought my final project was fun enough to share. In a nutshell, the assignment was to use the skills we had learned to create an homage to an artist. There were some detailed requirements relating to number of images used, different techniques we were required to employ in some fashion or another, and so forth, but that’s all quite boring, so here is the final product.

The subject of the first montage I did was impressionist Edgar Degas.

The second montage was a tribute to Sergio Leone, which I mostly chose because I thought Steve would enjoy it. Turns out I thought it was pretty fun as well.

And now, a quick word on copyright: Obviously, any copyright on any of the images I used in the Degas montage has expired. There may, however, be copyrighted material in the Leone piece because those movies are newer. I do not intend to infringe on anyone’s copyright; I made this for educational purposes (i.e. learning Photoshop) and I think it’s Fair Use. If you are the copyright holder of any of the images I used and you disagree, please let me know.

September 13, 2010

100th Post!

Yes, this is our 100th post. I told Steve we were coming up on it, and asked him if maybe he wanted his first post to be our 100th, and he said “you’ve written 99 posts already?” Well, it’s been a while, so yeah, I’ve written that many. Anyway, I thought I needed something memorable or exciting, so I’ve really put off posting anything that has been sort of in the works because it didn’t seem worthy. And now I realize that if I keep waiting for something huge to come up, it will never get written. So, here is something kind of stupid I came across today that I thought I would share.

First, a bit of background. In addition to the various interior design classes I am taking this semester, I am taking an online business law course. It is required for the advanced certificate in interior design, and I thought it would be pretty easy for me since I already have a fair amount of education and experience in that area. Every other week, we have a discussion question that we are supposed to post a comment about in an online forum. Two weeks ago, the teacher gave us our first question, due today. It is “if you could change one thing in the Constitution, what would it be and why?”

I’ll talk a little bit about some of the responses in a minute, but here is the point of this post: At 5:08 pm today, one of my classmates sends an email to the entire class, sans the instructor, saying he knows it is due today, but do we know if there is an exact time deadline or if he has until 11:59 p.m. I had to restrain myself from responding to him because the only thing I could think to say was

Dear Dumb-Ass,

In the time it took you to compose your message and send it out to the entire class, you could have completed the assignment, making your stupid question moot.

Sincerely,

Erin

It’s just not that hard. One or two sentences. That’s it.

It seems like most of the class has probably already posted their responses. Some are rather silly, some are stretching it to say they are written in English, and some are pretty thoughtful. What I’ve found the most interesting, though, is how un-politically correct many of them are. I chose something I thought would be pretty uncontroversial because I did not want to offend anyone. Some people . . . not real worried about that. There are people who have no qualms about saying they want to deport illegal aliens in summary proceedings and get rid of the 14th Amendment provision that persons born on U.S. soil are citizens. And they are happy to say it in a way that makes them sound xenophobic and racist.

That is not to say that those proposed changes might not be good ideas. If you are going to make such a proposal, though, you should probably do it in a way that does not imply that illegal immigrants are lazy slobs who aren’t paying taxes, or are terrorists trying to cause civil unrest. Because clearly there are people in our class that were not born here and/or are not citizens, and if I were them I might take offense. Just a thought.

June 8, 2010

Great Expectations?

I finished the first semester of my interior design program. I plan on posting a quick update with some of my final projects, but first, a few words on my summer class.

I’m taking computer aided drafting (AutoCAD). I have been looking forward to this class for several reasons. First, I like computers. I’m pretty handy with Photoshop, designed our wedding invitations and save-the-dates on Illustrator, and spent hours in front of PageMaker during my yearbooking days. So I’ve been interested to learn a new graphic program. Second, I like the drawings generated by hand drafting, but that gets messy and frustrating, and hard to erase when you make mistakes. Learning to do that neatly and cleanly on the computer sounds great.

Today was day two of my six week class. Yesterday was a bit slow, but that’s not entirely unexpected. First days are often spent going over the syllabus and other administrative matters. I was a little disappointed that the pace didn’t pick up a bit today. In fact, it slowed down. For this 8:00 a.m. class, the instructor did not start lecturing until nine. Because it’s a summer class and people — who voluntarily signed up for an 8:00 a.m. class — have trouble getting to school by eight. I really didn’t need an hour of lab time at the beginning of our second day of class; I was hoping to learn something new.

But it’s only day two, so I will keep an open mind and hopefully things will pick up. I still do think I will like working with AutoCAD. A number of my friends are in the class as well, so we should have some fun.