Janel Was Here: classes

Showing posts with label classes. Show all posts

Flash class starts

I'm taking two classes, Adobe Flash, and a one-credit class called Online Success. The latter is just learning how to do classy stuff. I can do that!
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I'm SO relieved to be back in fun graphics classes again. Math is fun too, or would be if it was a more leisurely pace, but they pile so much into math class! This last one that was causing me to go all freak-out, was having us do four sections a week, and each section contains six to ten new concepts. I'm not exactly a slug at all this, but my distraction level with five kids around is huge. You need a little quiet to understand new things in math.
With graphics class it's basically just tutorials, nothing you really have to "get", it's just another crafts project that can be set aside and later picked up at exactly the same place. And the workload is just a lot less. I don't know why, maybe they think math is supposed to be a serious class, and you're supposed to be grim and desperate all the time?

Math class

It's week three in math class. We have an exam every Tuesday. There's usually four sections in the math book, so I try to do the test first thing Tuesday, then a section each day. Saturday's available for spillover (which I haven't not needed yet) and then I do review on Monday. I've been having a real problem with attitude the last couple weeks, I just feel so frantic and panicky, "I can't possibly do this". Not that the math itself is so hard, but there's so many distractions around here, and my mind itself is the worst distraction. I daydream! I learned that word in second grade. The teacher accused me of doing it, and I didn't know what the word meant, so she enlightened me. If I had the luxury of a quiet white-painted room to study in, the daydreaming would be worse. I know I'm daydreaming, actually obsessing or fretting is more like it, and that causes me to expect even less success. Depressing thoughts multiply, you know. A few days ago I was in complete despair, just could not get my brain to settle on the problem and actually think. I took the math book outside in the sun, and got through a bunch of pages with no problem. So the key is a little distraction...

The KEY is to keep a few of my senses busy, so that a narrower section of my thoughts are free. If I sit outside in the breeze, or treadmill or knit while looking at the math book, it soaks right in, no problem. The other key is to read the section through first. It's usually eight or ten pages, and it doesn't take long to read that while knitting, and it's usually less terrifying than it looks. I get a basic grasp of what it's talking about, then I have a feeling of success-- after all, I did just get through a whole section! Then go back and do all the exercises in a better frame of mind, and they go quickly.

I'm practically the only one to post on the message board in this class. It's very puzzling. It's a full class, and it's an online class, so where is everybody? The last two classes always had lots of people posting questions and comments. There's only one other lady who's posted more than one question. The teacher's very good about answering questions, better if they're specific. He reminded me to watch the videos. I'm letting two of them load right now. After reading the section and writing this message, one video is half loaded and the other, oh hey, it's almost done. Dialup!! I remember when we chose among 14.4 and 28.8 modems and 56k was lightning fast. Yes, I'm an old bat. I'm the old person in class now. Always there's been one old bat to make the rest of us feel comfortable, but now I'm the old bat and everybody else is twenty. Sigh.

Photoshop Class!

My next class is a Photoshop class. The only project to be posted on the board this week is "anything", that's right, just photoshop something and share it with the group. So I sat down yesterday and had way more fun than I usually do. Usually if I started just playing with Photoshop guilt would get to me and I'd have to go do laundry or do something with the kids. But wait, this IS what I'm supposed to be doing!

The palette made me crazy. This isn't exactly what I wanted to do; I wanted to blend the other colored images (all from the Adobe Samples folder of safe, non-offensive images-- after all, I'm sure the teacher didn't really mean anything...) with the original paint blobs to make it look like glossy blobs of these images, but I'm not good enough with Photoshop yet to make it happen, so I settled for this.

The boat and lake image is the one provided for an example in the assignment, so I couldn't resist doing something else with that.

A collage for spring!

Book Cover Using Layer Masks

Assignment: combine images into a cover for a book or CD. I picked Way of An Eagle by Ethel Dell, which I had just read, and been very impressed with. Things were so different back then! It's fun to read a story written when things we consider unusual now, like having servants, were common, and things we take for granted, like a car ride, were worth featuring in the story.

About the novel:

The Way of an Eagle was published in 1912 and by 1915 it had gone through thirty printings. The Way of an Eagle is very characteristic of Ethel M. Dell's novels. There is a very feminine woman, an alpha male, a setting in India, passion galore liberally mixed with some surprisingly shocking violence and religious sentiments sprinkled throughout. A modern day critic, Nicola Beauman, says: "Most modern readers will greatly enjoy The Way of an Eagle, for it remains the best kind of read for anyone wishing to curl up in an armchair...and wallow unashamedly in a book that is entirely timeless...I love to imagine my mother and grandmother sobbing over books like this."

It's an old-fashioned love story with some wonderful messages. If you'd like to wallow too, you can read Way of an Eagle free here, at Gutenberg.

The lady is Gladys Cooper, an actress in the 1910s. I bet she'd make a great Muriel.

Using Clone Brush to Remove an Object

I'm especially pleased with the slide picture. I used the pen tool to make a new shape of shadow to match the railing, and airbrushed some of the surface.

This one was an assignment. Non-optional. Take this guy's beautiful skin and ruin it with a tattoo. Okay: let's at least make it a good one!

Assignment: Create a print ad with layers, selections, and masks.

Example of what we were supposed to produce.

I picked pianos for my project because "it's easy to sell a product if it's something you really like".
I used the pen tool for all the outlines. Pen tool makes superior outlines! It's a huge improvement over the way I was doing things before.
Please note there's no reflection of legs in the original, but I added them. I had to do each leg separately.