Graphics

= **Graphics Project Choice #1**  = = =

[|rose.mp3] In order to get my mind working and thinking properly, I created a list of all the four letter words that I could think of. As I wrote the words I thought of different was to illustrate them. This seemed fairly simple as I thought of words like rust, snow, rain that I felt could be easily illustrated. I wanted my word to be meaningful and had somewhat of a connection to me. I decided to create a word that captured femininity and delicacy and decided to use rose. A rose can symbolize many different things. When I see rose, I think of love, beauty, gracefulness, and many other warm and soothing thoughts. I tested the different features of GIMP so that I could get a better idea of most of the things the program could do outside of what I learned from previous assignments.

I wanted to create an image where the letters of the word formed the flower’s stem and the end of the letter E curved to create the bloom. I created a layer for each part of the picture (stem, bloom, and background) so that I could easily undo mistakes without destroying the entire image. Needless to say, I ended up with several different layers before choosing three layers for the final image. The layers also helped me to solely focus on different parts of the rose by making only one layer visible at a time.

For the stem, I chose to use Jokerman font because it creates letters with spikes coming from them. For me, the spikes represented the thorns on the stem. I chose dark green for the font color. I used the Rotate Tool to slant the word. Then, I selected Filters->Distort->Curve Bend to arch the letters. For the bloom, I started with a single Paint Brush dot. I used Iwarp, Filters->Distorts->IWarp, to deform the paint dot and add swirls. I could not completely control the final look of the warp, so I randomly played with the mouse until I created a few swirls that looked like a flower. I started with that basic swirl and copied and pasted the swirl around each other until it looked like a rose.

For the background, I used the color that I used for the flower, dark pink, for the background color. Then I added texture with the Clotify feature, Filters->Artistic->Clothify, and created the pink background curves by applying the Waves feature, Filters->Distorts->Waves.

I wanted to create an image that looked like a rose from the first glance as opposed to looking like the actual word rose. I knew that my rose was complete when I achieved this. I thought of choosing rust and have the letters look rusty; snow and have the letters look white and fluffy; rain and have the letters look wet; and maze and have a maze within the letter. With this assignment, I discovered tools that would have enhanced/improved previous projects.