Photoshop Tutorials

My within my collage are several things that represent or inspire me. We have my parents, the reason I am alive and the people who molded me into the young woman I am today. Of course we have my cat, Dash, who has stuck with me no matter what. And of course we have some of my good friends here at Kent State, including my mentor from the Kupita/Transiciones program, Mariah, and three friends I made in that same program, Zoe, Mariah, and Carmen. I wanted to be sure to include people I met at K/T in my collage, because participating in that program truly helped me to accept myself and express myself with pride. K/T and the people who participate are literal embodiments of representation and its importance. This is an idea I plan to elaborate on later.

I included several other images in my collage, including a picture of my computer screen with a folder next to it. I took that photo at a period of high stress for me, and it sort of inspired me to find proper coping mechanisms for that stress rather than letting it build until it boils over. Additionally, I included an image of several KSU magazines. As a journalism major, it is a literal dream of mine to work on one of these magazines while I am here. Though now may not be the right time, I will get there one day. I added a few other images, including some pictures of myself as well as a picture of my favorite book, A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khalid Hosseini.

In my revision, I focused on organization and flow of the collage. I felt that in my draft it was too stiff and harsh. I wanted to make sure that it told more of a story about who I am in some way, rather than being a bunch of images stuck together.

The tools I probably used most in my collage must have been the Layer and Brush tools. I hid the background in all of my pictures to reveal the image of the sky in the background. Additionally, I added some more vibrancy and color variance in the image of the sky, along with posterizing it to make it stand out a bit more. I also used the Transform Scale and Transform Rotate tools a lot to ensure that my images didn’t alter at weird ratios when I was resizing them in order to make them fit within the document. Lastly, I used the brush tool again in the colors red, yellow, and green, to add doodles in the blank spaces. I feel that this adds both an interesting element as well as represents the colors of Africa which have a strong influence for me, knowing that somewhere down the line those are my true roots.

I have not yet finished my collages so some of the pictures I talk about below are not yet featured there.

In my collage, there are three different levels. We start at the bottom with the people who matter most to me, including my mom, my roommate and best friend Morgan, my mentor from Kupita/Transiciones Mariah, and close friends I’ve made here at Kent, Carmen, Zoe and Mariah. My mentor Mariah and Kupita/Transiciones as a whole have become a large part of my life. Through Kupita and the friends I made there I was able to truly discover who I am as a person, and learn to love myself for who I am. This topic specifically is one that I plan to dive deeper into later.

Above that, we have several other images that represent topics that I may (or may not depending on time) talk about during this course. For example, the picture of my computer represents a potential topic of time management, and how to deal with stress, which is something I have been learning to cope with over the past few weeks. Photos like that of the novel A Thousand Splendid Suns and the student magazine UHURU indicate the topic of representation, and how important it is for marginalized people to have some form of representation.

All of the things I included in my collage have impacted me in some way. I may have realized something from it, learned a lesson from an experience with it, or I might have gained a deeper understanding of myself by interacting with it. My topic may be “About Me” but in reality, it is all of these sub-topics that make me who I am. This idea is also reflected in the topics I chose to talk about on my blog. I draw my inspiration for topics from things I have experienced, and most, if not all of my images are related to those experiences in one way or another.

I created my blog by having one background image, and several layer masks to add images over it. I added more saturation to the image of the sky and brightened up the tree in the background a bit. I resized to scale most of the pictures in my collage used the quick selection tool to fix anything that wasn’t working our right.