Tice Graphics 2

Reflection

I found a colorful image of a nearby New York state highway that I took while my husband and I were on a day trip a year or two ago. There were very few cars around, and it seemed like a good picture to use to add content. I decided to add components that represent my surrounding area in New York state. Each year in late August, Dansville, New York offers a Festival of Balloons where people from around the state come together to show off their hot air balloons, so I included a balloon in the project. The horse and buggy represent the Amish communities around my area in upstate New York.  Typically, we would see a horse and buggy on our way to Dundee, New York or another small community and not a major highway.  

I used the Honda image because I enjoyed the color, and used the drawing tools to draw a license plate, and the text tool to make it a vanity plate. Hidden in the hillside is a deer that represents the many close calls I have had driving down highways in my state. Can you find it? The pothole represents the way our roads are often in disrepair due to the pavement expanding and contracting with the heat and cold, the snow plows that dig into the pavement, and wear and tear from traffic.  It is as if we have two seasons, winter and orange barrel season, and potholes are prevalent in some areas.  I cropped a picture from another one of my photos of a sky near Harris Hill, New York and blended it using a mask with the bright blue sky on the background image.  Harris Hill is called the "soaring capital of America."

I used many tools in GIMP to create the image and attempt to blend the different pictures into the background to look as natural as possible, given my level of skill with GIMP. I have used Photoshop for many years, so I used my knowledge of that program to help me search for tutorials about keystrokes and tools to achieve the desired effect with the picture.  One method that came in handy was the mask tool that I had used in the previous assignment.  I found a tutorial that demonstrated how to combine a mask on a layer with the Gradient tool to blend the edges of the pictures together and make them look like part of the background.  

I used the Paths tool with the balloon, car, deer, and buggy and finally realized that as I clicked around the object, I didn't have to be perfect the first time.  The pothole was selected, copied, masked, blurred, and transformed (with the Perspective tool) to make it conform to the perspective of the image.  I could drag each dot on the path closer to the object to get a better selection.  With the Select | From Path option, I could copy the object and paste it into my working graphic and convert it to a New Layer by right-clicking on it in the Layers pane.  I was particularly happy with the job I did cropping the balloon.  I found a tutorial that showed how to invert and shrink the selection to get it closer to the balloon so I could cut it out of there and put it on its own layer and used the Eraser to remove the rest of the pixels that did not belong.  I used more of the Color, Tools, and Filters this time and believe the image turned out well.