I arrived at home one fateful night to find my living room in a complete mess:

I was horrified! At first I thought it must have been a burglar, however after further investigation there was nothing missing. Many valuable items were strewn across the floor, but nothing taken. This was an inside job. It had to be. This is when I went to my office and began trying to put together all of the evidence. I went to my faithful corkboard, and began to plot out the suspects.

I realized there were two main suspects, Boris the Cat, Cookie the Dog. I rummaged trough my old Polaroid photos and pinned the ones up of the two suspects. However the destruction was too massive to have been the cat in my opinion. And the dog is blind, something doesn’t add up here. This led me to the conclusion that something must be a miss. And then I saw it. The box of ashes of my old dog Niki. Dead for seven years. Could it be her ghost? Am I going crazy? That’s when I remembered I have a second dog. Although I can’t remember his name. I checked the security camera (which for some reason can only print out Polaroids), and I saw it. The big red dog sleeping, or was it sleeping? I used my fancy NCIS software to enhance the image. That’s when I saw it, right in his eyes. I had never seen redder, more evil eyes. It was horrific sight. I began to sob uncontrollably, and that’s when I heard a growl behind me, and then it was too late….

I really thought that this design assignment was cool! It took me awhile to figure out what type of crime/criminals I would want for this piece. I of course ended up deciding on my pets haha. I liked that idea that it could be pretty believable because of course dogs can miss behave.  I really enjoyed putting all of the connection together. The idea here is that Niki and Cookie were friends (hence the green arrows). Boris and the red dog (His name is Sydney) are enemies (hence the yellow arrow). They are all centered around the crime scene. I liked the idea of adding the sticky notes on top of some of the images with the red text (which is supposed to look like handwritten pen notes). In the end the culprit was caught, but it was a little too late it would seem. I feel bad for giving Sydney a bad wrap in this piece, he is a very good dog in real life haha. I really got a kick out of adding Niki’s ghost as a suspect, I don’t know why though.

As for the process of actually creating the piece, I like normal used Photoshop. I first looked up images of cork boards on http://publicdomainpictures.net/. I grabbed the first good looking one, and imported into Photoshop. After that I imported each of one the images into the picture one by one, and then rasterized them (so they could be manipulated, before they were just linked to the actual images). I put each picture on its own layer, and under each layer I created a new layer which had the white box around it to make it look like a Polaroid. After that I added the text using the Photoshop text tool. Then I added the sticky notes, I made them by creating a layer on top of the pictures and then creating a yellow box. After that I finally added in all the arrows, that was a lot more tricky than I thought it would be, because the Photoshop shape tool really doesn’t have too many options. If I were to do this assignment again I would use a different piece of software to create the arrows, but I don’t know which one!