My combophoto was inspired by Stephen Mcmennamy’s combophoto of “cauliflower and poodle”. I wanted to use an animal’s body and replace the head with another picture. The animal I used was a bald eagle and initially, I wanted to replace the bald eagle’s head with a human head, kind of the same concept of the reverse of the the ancient Egyptian god, Anubis. It’s the reverse because Anubis has a human body but animal head while I wanted to create a combophoto of an animal body and a human head. However, it was really hard finding a human head with the same white color of the neck of the bald eagle so instead I used a baseball.
For my combophoto I choose to make it look like it was raining confetti. I used a cloud photo and a picture of falling confetti and edited them to make it look like the clouds were raining heart shaped confetti. When I was trying to make my combophoto it was difficult to find the pictures I wanted at the right angles. Due to my limited knowledge of photo editing I needed to find pictures that required less complex editing processes. I got to manipulate different photos to make an image I wanted and got to learn more about photo editing through this assignment.
A combination of a photo of my legs and a photo of my wardrobe handles, both taken by me
For this Sunday Sketch, I knew I wanted to take the photos myself, so I started the search in my dorm room for things I could take photos of. The first objects to catch my eye were the handles on my wardrobe closet; they looked like balancing beams. After snapping a picture of the handles, I proceeded to take a picture of my legs. Using PicsArt, I combined the two photos to make it look like I was balancing on one of the wardrobe handles. PicsArt really made it easy to combine the two photos because there was a feature that automatically removed the background from my legs photo. I believe the finished result perfectly embodies what I am doing right now—trying to balance on the beam that is college life.
At first, I had trouble coming up with the idea of this week’s Sunday sketch. I was looking around my room for the mere semblance of an idea. I decided to direct my focus to things that I am passionate about, thinking that would give me an idea. Since I had my violin near me, I thought incorporate a violin into my sketch. However, I did not like any of the ideas I came up with, so I shifted gears to some of my textbooks. I took a class about Socrates last semester, and that is where the idea of this sketch was born. I decided to merge Socrates’s face with a highway tunnel. I went into the class last semester intimidated not knowing anything about Socrates, which represents the darkness of the tunnel. Additionally, the class was about determining whether Socrates was innocent or guilty based on his charges. In the beginning, I found Socrates’s trial to be full of mystery, which is also why I think these two images pair well together.
While browsing through photos on Google, I was searching for photos relating to food and a specific color. I initially was going to combine a photo of Almond Joy and a glacier, but I decided not to because I couldn’t find a good glacier photo. Then, I came up with the idea of powdered sugar being dusted on a dessert mountain. It took me a bit to delete the unnecessary part of the hand photo because it was a little meticulous. The lighting of the hand and the mountain was off, so I had to play around with filters to make it as close as possible. The final image is a mountain being dusted with powdered sugar.
(Apologies for the poor photo, my dorm is lit rather poorly)
So, as you can tell, I’m not the greatest at visual notes. Which is strange because, back in middle school and early high school, those were the only kinds of notes I took. I think the main reason now is just because, I just don’t take a lot of notes. I know I know that makes me a bad student in the eyes of a few but I’m a theatre major. In my theatre classes we don’t learn by lecture and note taking, but rather by practice. In fact, most of my classes we just don’t lecture anymore. Most of my note taking is done outside the class room while reading whatever assigned text I have. These aren’t even from a class but rather from my latin tutoring, and with latin being structured the way it is they’re no strong visual components for the subjunctive verbs. It is nice to do my notes in different colors again. Having them separated by color somehow lets me compartmentalize them easier. If I ever do go back to re do a sketch assignment. It will probably be this one.
During the process of creating my visual notes, I learned that it is much easier to take notes visually. It saves a lot more time compared to writing notes traditionally, and creates an actual image that my brain can remember instead of pure text. It is also much easier to connect ideas through visual notes as it is more free flowing and does not have to follow a structure. I found the overall process very enjoyable because I did not have to confine my thoughts, but I can let them flow freely. I think I might start taking notes for some classes in a more visual format from now on.
Background sky photo taken by me. Ometepe Volcano photo from Flickr.
This Sunday sketch was a bit challenging but I enjoyed it! The examples provided through the instructions were very cool and instantly reminded me of a forced perspective assignment I once had in my high school photography class. I find forced perspective photography much more difficult compared to this assignment though because I have to find actual items I can physically work with, which can limit my ideas. On the other hand, I have the entire internet and CC licensed images to work with for this assignment—the slightly challenging part is just deciding what photos to use and how. I remember, for that forced perspectives photography assignment, I had used a small teapot, held it out, and aligned it with a light cloud on the sky so it looked like steam coming out from it. Initally, I wanted to recreate that, but this time “digitally” using photos from Flickr—I found the prettiest teapots—but I could not find an appropriate cloud photo, so I started going through my own camera roll of endless sky photos. As I scrolled through, I found some sunset photos I took last semester while I was on campus, and then a new idea hit me. When I showed my mom those photos a few months back, she had mentioned how the clouds looked like some sort of explosion, so I decided to switch up my idea—just a bit, still on the topic of some sort of steam coming out from something—and looked for volcano photos on Flickr. I was not finding any that I thought were good, until I came across this one of the Ometepe Volcano in Nicaragua, and I just knew it was perfect.
I used Picsart to crop the volcano and put it over my photo; I also darkened the silhouettes in my photo. Then I used Polarr to add a filter on the image.
For my visual note-taking exercise, I chose to reformat a section of my Continued Writing Course “Thinking with Fungi”. During the section, I wanted to really try to use flowcharts drawings, and non-conventional word placements to create a page that would help me “take-in” the material easier. I am more of a visual learning and I think that this helped in a way that I had the freedom to group things however I want as opposed to the “vertical” organizational structure of notes inside of a document would be like. Before doing this assignment, I had a process of thinking about a rough idea of how I wanted to organize the ideas and what kind of images/graphs I wanted to put inside of it. I found it enjoyable because I was just exposing myself again to the material I had just learned, and I was able to do some drawing of the fungi and plants. However, I think that I would not do this regularly because it took up more time and it takes more effort to hand write out notes that I have already typed, and this was for a writing class which would make it hard for me to organize the notes if I were to write an essay using points from the notes.
This combophoto depicts powdered sugar as snow, accumulating on a hilltop. I randomly got this idea while brainstorming ideas because I had just finished watching a baking show on the Food Network. One of the bakers made a remark about how the confectioner’s sugar they were using to make frosting looked like fluffy snow. One of the major challenges I had in creating this photo was trying to find an image of powdered sugar that made sense. A lot of the images I came across were of sugar in bags which did not really make sense if it was supposed to be snow falling out of the sky. Finally, I discovered this image of powdered sugar in a sieve being sifted. In terms of the editing, it was relatively simple and helps get the gist of my idea across.
