~- Blend Me -~

I practiced blending with my own pictures. I like the Moth brush in the exercise so I made it big and put it cover half of my face. Adding more layers with 2 different parts of my face. I like my nose and my mouth going together: one for this - and one for my half top face with just the eyes.

I found Eraser is a really effective tool in blending, you should try it in some way, really made your pictures blend into each other and naturally "erase" the pictures' edges for you.

Blend Exercise

I didn't satisfy much about the colors in this pictures, but after many times redoing, I think this is closest to what I want it to be. It's too green though, i think but green is the main color for this so let take it strong to express the mysterious, cold and scary for the picture. Please give me your comment to make it better.
Thank you

--- Blur and Motion ---

When I still got stuck with choosing pictures to practice what have learned in class, I suddenly find the picture below.

At first sight, I just look at the final picture and thought it is a kind of orchid. See it the second time, there it goes a beautiful vision for the life of a tulip. Even with the moment it leave the world, it still has its own beauty.

Then I quickly thought of a motion - creating motion with blur and depth with shadow. Began to play with cropping and layers. Many layers to take care of, the shadow and colours transition, blur proportion. It brought me the final work after 4 hours. The last flower cost me much time in cropping because there are many separate and different color areas. I made it a challenge to practice cropping with that. It doesn't seem to be perfect this time but I can feel my skill in using pen tool has been upgraded :)

My final work

Special thanks to Selester for the picture.

Orchid Business Card

Before the lesson about cropping - I didn't know how to use pen tool in Illustrator and Photoshop. I often used Magnetic Lasso Tool to crop my pictures but now i find this new method even more efficiently. I read many tutorials about cropping using pen tool before but it seemed to be hard to understand and do like it said word by word. Only practice will bring you success. And now I can do it. Applying the ZEN theory, I can feel pleasant not to do it hurriedly. A way to practise patience :)

I first use black for the background but then I found a more attractive color for the card, dark purple seemed to be better suited.

The picture above is the original size (the required size for the card): 5.5cm x 9cm

Below is a bigger size for a clearer view on this card.

Gestault

The circle of the flower's shape inspired me most in this design. People easily feel love when see something curves than straight lines. The softness is also felt in this kind of flower so I think it's most appropriate for the text's meaning to be developed in visual.

I grouped each text group into circle shapes like smaller flowers flying high. Arranging them up - down so they seemed to fall into one another, making the meaning of the title to be clearer when mentioning about sex life of plants. The last group of text is arranged as a balance for the whole design. We need balance in any situation and therefore the circle of sex life also needs to be balanced.

Sun & Moon

I often relate what I've learned or seen with my own situation, my memory. Here it goes with my exercise about the Moon and the Sun. My birth year belongs to fire element and the animal represent for me is the lion. From those facts, i want to link the symbol SUN(hot) and MOON (cold) with the Lion Face.

The sun is considered the important factor for our system and the lion is the king of the forest. The moon, in the other hand, is represented for something more calm, but it doesn't mean that the moon is nice and silent. It still hide something, mysterious and dangerous.

I retouched the photo of a lion i found and made it look like more "human" to be a saint for both Sun and Moon.

Picture Source: Lion Face

COFFEE

This is a flash that I made for a simple website last semester. I had to search many sources to create effects over the images such as the blur, fade in, fade out and the way the branch move to best suit the Website about Coffee. Leave your comment when you see the flash and give me your opinions. Thank you.

It can take time, but it will work.