Erasure Reflective Essay

One of my favorite images from the erasure project is the one from the National Geographic, October 1998 with the man in the middle of the forest up the tree. At first I was going to take out the tree and have him floating there but I realized I kind of did that for the woman on the mountain so I decided I should just take out the guy and his pole instead. 

I thought removing the guy and the pole wouldn’t be too hard but I was sadly mistaken. I used the clone stamp for this entire process, cloning every little leaf I could find and meshing them together over the man’s figure to make a very convincing bush. I would normally use the blend tool to help but with the leaves being so distinct I didn’t want to risk it looking like I obviously removed something that was clearly on top of the bush. I’m glad with the final result of that picture because I showed it to my friend and she didn’t know what was missing from the picture before she saw the original. 

For all the images in the erasure project I used the clone stamp quite frequently. It is a very useful tool in removing something but still wanting the original background to be there. I used the blend and healing pen a lot on the image of the guy putting up the missing phone number posters. I also used it a lot in the mountain climber in the clouds picture. Other then that it was mainly the clone stamp tool throughout all the images. 

I believe I did when it came to the finer details. I’m very OCD and I didn’t want any of the images to look as if something was obviously taken out if you hadn’t already seen the original. I made sure to make everything perfect. I don’t know if that counts as a critical perceptive, but I did critique myself until it was perfect. 

True Nature

National Geographic, October 1998

Absent Palm Trees

National Geographic, August 1997

What time is it?

National Geographic, October 1998

Climbing the Clouds

National Geographic, August 1997 pg. 46

Missing faces

National Geographic, February 2009, pg 107

Scratch Reflective Essay

When working on this at first I had no idea of what to do. I started out doing the collaboration “Triangle Madness” because my instructor said it should look geometric but then I branched out to forming my own shapes from previous ones such as triangles, rectangles, and circles. 

Working with flat color was really boring at first. There’s no real depth to it, but as I kept working with it I realized I could do a lot that I didn’t know I could by just changing the colors slightly to create a sort of depth. With the color choices I had it was pretty straight forward on the “Leap of Faith” picture. That one was depicting a specific scene so blue sky was necessary and a brown building so no real complications with color on that collaboration. The “Triangle Madness” picture was kind of weird. I originally had four colors in it consisting of red, orange, blue, and green, but than I started using opacity and lighting and darkening certain triangles. All of a sudden new colors were coming in. I don’t know if my colors go well together, and they probably don’t, but it was quite interesting to experiment with the color lightings and making certain ones negative and dissolve and luminescent. With the “Dessert Time” picture the colors were pretty straight forward on what each dessert was but when it came to the background I got a little crazy with different shades of pink and opacity of each circle. I felt like it needed to be cute looking since all the desserts were pretty cute themselves.