The next assignment I decided to complete this week was “Where Did The Soda Go?” for the humorous fails and over-dramatic reactions. I was considering doing something like this for awhile, so I was happy to discover an assignment related to it! I knew of this infomercial because I saw it a few years ago and thought it was utterly ridiculous. Luckily Google knew what infomercial I was looking for when I did a search for “infomercial where the bowls explode out of the cabinet.” This was the first result! It features a woman going to her kitchen cabinet, opening it, and then it looks like an entire store’s worth of tubberware explodes out at her. I thought this was a perfect example for this assignment because it’s so over-the-top and ridiculous, because I don’t think it’s possible for someone to own that many bowls, let alone fit them in that cabinet! The video was on YouTube, so I copied the URL and pasted it into GIPHY to create a GIF. I made two versions of this GIF, the first which is just a simple loop of the “infomercial fail” and the second slightly edited in a more fitting manor. Both can be found below! Please take a look and then tell me what you think in a comment down below!

For this next assignment, I chose to do “4 lines, 5 dots, and 1 curve.” I used the Paint 3D program that comes pre-installed on Windows computers to create this. I considered using the old Microsoft Paint, but this program actually allows you to do significantly more and produce cleaner images. Since this assignment calls for you to only use “4 lines, 5 dots, and 1 curve”, I used exactly that. I’ll give a step-by-step of each of these. The four lines consist of the three parallel lines on the right side of the image, with the fourth line being the orange line on the left side. The five dots are the giant light-gray circle, the two slightly misshapen circles (or ellipses) that are dark gray (right) and yellow (left), and the two smaller dots where the colors are inverted of one another. The final part, the curve, is actually the antenna looking thing. You may ask yourself what this picture is meant to represent. It does have meaning behind it, because I didn’t just come up with this. I based it off a video game character. The character is from Fallout: New Vegas (that game I reviewed last week) and is the eye-bot ED-E (which I pronounce as “Eddie”), a spherical shaped robot that acts as one of your possible companions. The representation isn’t perfect considering I had quite a few restraints. However I’m quite happy with how it turned out since it does look like a minimalist drawing of ED-E. If you’re curious to see what ED-E looks like, I’ve included an image of him (them?) in a gallery behind the image I created. Simply click the left or right arrows and compare the two! Please tell me what you think down below!

For this assignment, I wanted to incorporate something new into the old. The new being the assignment, “Splash The Color”, and the old being this photograph I took back in December 2017. A little story behind this image is that I was in Washington D.C. on a high school art trip. At the time I was taking two photography classes and thus had two assignments to complete. The two classes were Photojournalism and Commercial Photography. For Photojournalism I was supposed to do street photography, taking pictures of whatever I wanted. There was no minimum or maximum, as long as I had fifteen photos to share in class from the trip. For Commercial Photography I was required to use a Holga 120N medium format film camera. A medium format camera takes 120 film, which only allows you to take between 12 and 16 shots. Afterwards we were to take more photos with 35mm film in out normal cameras. This image actually shows the intersection of those two projects: a digital picture taken of a Holga film camera. The other camera you see in the picture belongs to a friend, but I did have my own film camera stored away in my bad at this time. The picture itself wasn’t that remarkable, however the bright color of the Holga inspired me to do this assignment. I used Pixlr once again for this assignment, mainly because I’m too cheap to pay for Photoshop. It doesn’t matter, since Pixlr does almost everything Photoshop does, or you can manipulate it to make it look like it does what Photoshop does. The process of creating this effect was simple. I opened the image in Pixlr’s photo editor, created a duplicate layer which I converted into black and white, then erased the area around the the camera so only the Holga would retain any semblance of color. The rest of the image stayed black and white since it was “masked” by the duplicate layer. I actually did this a few times with a few different images back in high school (but with Photoshop) so I’m thankful Pixlr operates in a similar way that allowed me to create this effect. I know the image isn’t perfect, since the depth of field is a little wonky. I know people don’t want excuses, but I was having a bit of a problem with my eyes back then. I’m right-eye dominant, but I’ve worn glasses since I was very young. Something happened with my vision that year, causing my right eye to progressively get worse, so many of my photos from back then have some focus issues. Since then I’ve taught myself how to shoot with both eyes, so my technique has improved quite a bit! Please let me know what you think in a comment down below!

I decided to try my hand at the assignment “Populate the Landscape” since I am a huge fan of Arrowhead altered art. I’d like to start off by saying it was a complete accident that I picked the exact same Rob Ross painting as the one on this assignment’s description page. I actually found this image through a Google Search, and only realized it was the same one after I had already completed this assignment. Sorry, not sorry! After finding an image I liked through Google, I took inspiration from the Northern Lights in the sky on just who I wanted to populate this image with. Now, I’m sure many people reading this probably got the reference in the title or even recognized the muscle-bound figure raising his sword to the heavens. If you don’t, well you’ve missed out on a glorious part of popular culture. Anyways, the figure is He-Man, the alter ego of Prince Adam from He-Man and the Masters of the Universe. The entire reason I decided to include him in this image is because of the way the light seems to be shining down on that particular part of the painting. It reminded me of He-Man’s transformation, which involves him raising his sword to the heavens and shouting his battle cry, which prompts lightning to rain down on him, transforming the cowardly Prince Adam into the powerful warrior He-Man. I know it sounds a little cringey, but it was a 1980s cartoon and comic series that has been a huge part of my life, and I thought it fit this painting. How I edited this wasn’t particularly difficult. I don’t have photoshop, so I used Pixlr to drop He-Man into Bob Ross’ world. Pixlr is a great free alternative to Photoshop, and it works right in your browser. I’ve used it in the past to colorize an old photograph and really enjoyed how user friendly it was. I actually think it’s better than Photoshop in some ways, mostly because I’ve never been able to wrap my head around Photoshop. I think this particular painting compliments the figure of He-Man, since the colors give is a fantasy or magical vibe, whereas He-Man is a character from a magical background. Please tell me what you think by commenting below!

After looking over the DS106 Assignment Bank, I really wanted to do the assignment “Your Favourite Photo?” simply because I know without a doubt which photograph that is. Thankfully, I uploaded this photograph to Flickr about a week ago an...