Lab 5 Reflection

     I recently completed the fifth lab for my Visual Design course. In this lab we used our skills with the paintbrush to recreate a drawing in Photoshop. The first thing we did was draw a picture. It could be a picture of anything, as long as it had 10 elements. My original drawing is shown below (wihout original color).

 

Then we needed to open up a scan of our drawing in Photoshop. Once in Photoshop we used the Paintbrush tool to recreate and even make better our drawing. The Paintbrush has many settings. The first and quite obvious was the color. We were constantly changing the color of our brush to color in the different aspects of our drawing. There was also the size of the brush. The size can be changed so that it can be very small to get the smallest nooks in our drawing and big enough to paint big things rather quickly. Hardness is another setting that adjusts the sharpness of the paint's edges. The more the hardness the sharper the edges. This helped us either blend things in with low hardness or create contrast with high hardness. The tip of the brush could also be changed, anything from soft circles to hard squares and more.

     We also used different clolring techniques that involved our selection skills from previous labs. It is somethimes very difficult to color within the lines of some shapes. However if we selected a particular area, using any selection tool like such as the lasso, we can color in that area without worrying about the color going to areas where it is not wanted. Another technique involed how we took advantage of the properties of layers. Coloring in an element of the bakground such as the sky or ground can be tedious. It can be hard avoiding all other elements of your drawing whether it be painting around them or selecting around them. However if we create a layer that it entirely the color of the background element and put that layer all the way at the bottom it will appear where there is no other element without interfering with other objects in the drawing. This saves time and energy.

     The skills we learned in this lab are important to a web designer because these skills can help a web designer draw and color. The paintbrush gives the user a lot of freedom. Knowing how to use that freedom can be helpful in drawing appealing artwork for the background of a webpage. Or maybe the knowledge of how to easily color with the paintbrush via selection can help a web designer color over a real life picture and make it look like a cartoon. The coloring technique can also help a web designer enhance things like making a man's beard look bushy.

My Final Work

A Screenshot of my Workspace