Photoshop Tutorial: Lynda.com training

Watched a movie on how to do select tools. 

We started with magic wand tool. I used one of my own photos of a little owl.

This is my selected picture. When watching this movie, this guy showed many ways to select the part of of the picture that you would like. It almost is too much information sometimes. He is using a difficult photo where I'm using something simple-ish.  Then he wanted to use the quick selection tool. The Quick selection tool is used for painting within the image you would need. 

He went through his process and I found the entire tutorial very informative yet almost too much. He was funny at times but I almost fell asleep.

Book Ideas No.2- Random Objects/1 drawing

This is a neat wine bottle that my father had in his wine closet. I have really grown up around wine so I thought I would fine a wine that was decent and had a good shape bottle to it.


This is Hoots the Carved Owl (named it that; was going to go for Hooters, but then people would get confused). I thought that this would be interesting just because he just looks so neat. I would have to use a better camera to take his picture but overall I think it is a great idea.


This is one of my shoes. I thought that this one was interesting for its belt buckle, and its one of the best shoes to sink your feet in.


Soy Sauce....who can live without soy sauce? If anyone could, I feel bad for them. Anyways, my family has had this same bottle for years. We have never changed it and its a staple thing on our table for dinner. Yum! (too andy worhol? possibly, but I thought of it so why not.)

And last but not least, I drew this Ice Cream cone a week ago or so. I thought that this was a great pencil drawing. so if I want to do anything for that, I would scan it in. I could see this one going a long way with how big it is, multiple colors, patterns, etc. I think this one is my favorite.

Book Ideas No.1- Outside Scenes

My family and I were walking down in the Pearl and I looked down and I saw this little plastic horse figurine attatched to old horse ties. I read about it later that art students were taking different little horses and attatching them to old horse ties that have remained over the years here in Portland. I thought that it was a really neat idea and I took this picture with my phone. Turned out good if I must say myself. And out of all the ones I saw, this one was the coolest because I think it's a paint horse.


This was in my boyfriends backyard. This was taken a couple weeks ago when we actually had some sunshine here in this grey state we live in. I thought that these flowers were beautiful; I wanted to capture them from odd angles and this was was wonderful because of how the sunshine makes them transparent and brighter.



This has to be one of the coolest flowers on the face of the earth. Pink as it may be (not my favorite color in the world), this is the "Bleeding Heart". My mother has some of these in her backyard as well, but these are at my boyfriends house as well. I took his camera and started shooting everything cool I could see (he has a better camera than I do...How does that happen?). Take advantage of the sunshine....I got some color and also some fantastic pictures. I think that is a win win situation.

This picture was also at my boyfriends house. This was a potted plant that was in the shade. It had the smallest flowers ever, but they were so cool I just had to zoom in and shoot it. These flowers are about the size of my thumb fingernail. That entire cluster. Just so small and delicate and yet so neat.

Art Building Proposal: Final

This is my first proposal for our art building. It consist of a meerkat that I took a photo of. I decided on the meerkat because I think these are fasinating creatures. They live in a colony yet their individuality is still extremely strong. I believe that that is what art students have to go through. People who are in art are linked together in the same way as meerkats are, more experienced people will help the "young" ones.

This is my second proposal for the art building. I designed this in mind that there are hundreds of flavors of ice cream in the world. Each flavor could represent what art students are. Different yet still the same basic thing. I used the unity of only two flavors because art students are not just "designers", but they can also be in the entertainment side of art (theater, etc.). So the two types of ice cream is a quick representation of that. Again I use the idea of re-painting the brink to give them a little more punch rather than keep them the weathered things that they are now.

This is my final proposal for the art building. I used a picture I took down in Las Vegas's Bellagio Hotel and Casino. This piece was made by Dale Chihuly and it contains over 2,000 individual glass flowers. I took my photo and transfered it over to photoshop and then used different sections of the photo to create a different view for each side.

Illustrator: Masking

I watched a tutorial that helped with masks and I decided to try it out.

So this was the picture I picked to try out. The great thing about CS3, to put a mask on a photo, all you would have to do is click the Mask button. From there I could shrink the mask to fit the main part of the photo

So this is the "new and improved" picture. I shrunk the photo so it just encases the only part of the photo I like

The next thing I learned was that I could make a curve to the mask since it has individual points. So what I did was I curved all four sides of the picture and then fit it more to just fit me and the horse Riley.

So this was the last little bit. Not really refined, but it was a great skill to learn for illustrator without having to go into photoshop.

Week 2: Reading Tutorials

This tutorial was about making 3-D Stars. I read the whole process about how to do it. This person that made the tutorials went into great detail about how to make gradients for the starts and how to make it look "realistic" They used the illutrator star to demontrate the capabilities of this process, but I am sure that a person could do this with their own designed start. It would just take a little bit longer to do.


Making a business card I think is an important thing for when you want clients or you just feel like you want to pass them out. I absolutly love looking at peoples business cards so it was nice to see a tutorial on how to make one. They used a simple and boring design, but it gives a nice starting look to see how these things are made and what you would have to do to get it started.

This tutorial was absolutely confusing. The person had three different ways to make a vector cd look real, but none of them went into great detail. There were some that seemed really easy yet another that was explaining how to get the rainbow effect on the cd, so that was really hard to understand.

More pen tool of course, one of the most important. Saw this first and was just watching it. A very good tutorial. One of the only ones that I found that was in video form, Adobe live docs sort of thing. Excellent way to demonstrate the use of the pen tool and step by step actions on what to click and how to use it.

Vector Pen Tool Excercise

This tutorial was used to practice how to make the word vector with just the pen tool. I saw that people were doing it so I wanted to practice the skills I learned by myself and see how they did it.

This is the starting point of my tutorial. The straight edged letters were really no problem for me. Those are the letters V, E, and T. Vet...funny stuff. Anyways, those letters were easy as making toast ( or scrambled eggs) but the parts where I really learned on were the curved letters C, O and R. I had a little snafoo with the letter C because on the lower straight edge of the C, I couldn't get a line across there. Fortunatly, I figured out that I wasn't clicking there to make the line so that was my issue. Quite simiple remedy actually; but overall, that experience was enriching since I had never done anything like that before.

This is a tiny picture of my final piece. Very colorful if I might say. The whole vector thing took me about 15 minutes or so. The R and the C were I must say the most interesting to do. I might try other words and see how those go. Alphabet? Maybe not till summer time haha.