I am not an art person. I am not a handwriting person. I cannot draw a stick figure. I hate drawing. I did try to make them simple, because I prefer simple stuff. I’m honestly okay with a logo being my name against a white background in all lowercase Times New Roman with a period at the end, but that may not be enough to use Illustrator to finish. I think in order just to fulfill the requirements on the assignment, it may work to use #5/6 or one of #s 2, 8, or 9.

Many people have somewhere that’s their home away from home; it may be their best friend’s house, the vacation they go on every summer, some even consider college the home away from home. My home away from home is a summer camp called Camp Christopher. I camped there for 6 years and I now work there as a camp counselor, which is a dream for most campers, but I get to live that dream. I tried to communicate the feeling of camp as well as I could. The beauty and togetherness of camp are the two things that make it so amazing. It’s a full week of being outside in the woods without phones, singing songs, and making lasting friendships. It’s the campfires that the entire camp attends to say hello and to say goodnight, but never goodbye. The skies are my favorite part of being outside all day, it’s always pretty. Whether it’s rained all day or the sun is relentless, it’s always pretty. Especially at night because unlike in Cleveland, you can actually see the stars clearly. I didn’t include a picture of those because that’s something I’ll always keep to myself and my campers. 

I used mainly the Layer Mask Essentials unit to show me how to make this collage. My critiques to myself are that I probably should’ve used a bigger canvas so that I could’ve expanded the sky that is underneath the sun rays, and also been able to show more of that, as well as the whole image looks darker than I would have liked and I should work on changing that. All of the photos were taken by me. I do think if I use a bigger canvas for the final draft, I can play around with the sizes more as well as the colors and it could make all the difference. Using Photoshop, I used “Create New” to make a custom canvas size, then using Bridge I added all 5 photos to Photoshop before adding all of them to the custom canvas as layers. For each layer I made sure the entire photo was shown by using Transform>Scale. Then after much confusion, I finally used Layer>Layer Mask>Reveal All, then used the brush tool to help blend them together.

To revise my collage, I took the suggestions of my peers and moved the fire from the top left corner into the middle where the previous fire was because the coloring of the original fire is much less vibrant. I also changed the coloration of the photo of those around the fire, as it looked dull in comparison to the other photos in the collage. I did this by using the Camera Raw Filter setting under filters and changing the vibrance and saturation. Finally, I added the sign that says “Camp Christopher” in the top left where the first fire was originally. I did this because a peer pointed out how it could look like a field trip or summer camp, I wanted to make it even more clear what I was trying to show. I used the same method as I did with the Layer Masks and Brush tools beforehand.

Many people have somewhere that’s their home away from home; it may be their best friend’s house, the vacation they go on every summer, some even consider college the home away from home. My home away from home is a summer camp called Camp Christopher. I camped there for 6 years and I now work there as a camp counselor, which is a dream for most campers, but I get to live that dream. I tried to communicate the feeling of camp as well as I could. The beauty and togetherness of camp are the two things that make it so amazing. It’s a full week of being outside in the woods without phones, singing songs, and making lasting friendships. It’s the campfires that the entire camp attends to say hello and to say goodnight, but never goodbye. The skies are my favorite part of being outside all day, it’s always pretty. Whether it’s rained all day or the sun is relentless, it’s always pretty. Especially at night because unlike in Cleveland, you can actually see the stars clearly. I didn’t include a picture of those because that’s something I’ll always keep to myself and my campers.

I used mainly the Layer Mask Essentials unit to show me how to make this collage. My critiques to myself are that I probably should’ve used a bigger canvas so that I could’ve expanded the sky that is underneath the sun rays, and also been able to show more of that, as well as the whole image looks darker than I would have liked and I should work on changing that. All of the photos were taken by me. I do think if I use a bigger canvas for the final draft, I can play around with the sizes more as well as the colors and it could make all the difference. Using Photoshop, I used “Create New” to make a custom canvas size, then using Bridge I added all 5 photos to Photoshop before adding all of them to the custom canvas as layers. For each layer I made sure the entire photo was shown by using Transform>Scale. Then after much confusion, I finally used Layer>Layer Mask>Reveal All, then used the brush tool to help blend them together.