Body Image Project

Upon looking at your finished images, I think most of you need to redo your pictures. Now that you know how to do it, you can focus on making it look good. There were only about 3 of your pictures that I would consider "magazine cover" worthy (I'll let you know who you are on Monday). Give it another shot, update the blog entry you already published, and I'll take another look at your work.

Blog Entry #6: Reflection on your "Perfect" Body Image

After making yourself look like a magazine cover, put your before and after pictures on your blog and answer the following questions in paragraphs. Remember that the reader doesn't know the assignment, so use these questions as a springboard to explain your thoughts.

• How do you feel about the overall transformation of your picture?
• How does this change your perspective of pictures in magazine ads?
• What does this tell you about today's view of the perfect body image?
• What are two things you think you did really well on? Why?
• What are two things you think you could improve on or spend more time on? Why?

This blog post is due by midnight on October 27.

"Perfect" Body Image

Our next project will be to create the "Perfect" Body Image. Not that it is really the "perfect" image, but that seems to be the way the media thinks we should all look.

So, for the next few classes you will be able to work on this. Today in class I will take photographs of you for you to use as your "Before" pictures. Then you will make yourself up to look like an image in a magazine. I'll show you some of the ones that students made in previous years during class.

I have several tutorials that you can use to achieve this effect:

Face Swapping

Changing Eye Color

Apply Face Makeup

Add Makeup and Photo Retouching

70+ Beauty-Retouching Photoshop Tutorials

You don't have to use these tutorials, you can find your own, but at least it's a place to start. The last day you will have to work on this in class will be Oct 27 and it must be posted to your blog (see directions for Blog #6) by midnight on Oct 27.

So, have fun, and make yourself look the way you've always wanted using Photoshop! But realize that all those models have been Photoshopped too!

Agenda October 13 - Realism in Photography

Today we'll begin talking about the realism of published photos and how you can't believe everything you see in print. We'll begin by discussing photojournalism and some instances where people have edited photos and changed their meaning.

Also, look at one of my favorite sites, photoshopmistakes.com, which shows some horrible (and sometimes hilarious) mistakes that people have made using Photoshop. All of these actually were published!

Then, we'll focus more on magazines editing photos of women. I'll show you a few videos from You Tube. One is Dove's Evolution , another is one example of an expert Photoshop user, and one that uses the liquify tool. After looking at several of these examples you will get the chance to see what you can do to yourself using Photoshop! How easily can you make yourself look like a photo on a magazine cover?

Your homework tonight is to find a picture of a celebrity that you would like to try to paste yourself on. The point of this project is to see how easily you can take a "real" person and make them look like a magazine cover, which we all know is not what people actually look like.

Blog Entry #5 - "A Day in the Life of A Mercy Student" Collage

You will have today and Monday (Oct 6 & 10) to work on editing your collage. After you complete your collage, you will need to reflect upon it. In 1-2 clear and precisely written paragraphs, reflect on what you have learned and how you used the photography elements to compose your photos in the collage. Explain how you used at least 5 different Photoshop tools to manipulate the images in your collage. Don't forget to save your collage as a JPEG and upload it to your blog. This blog entry will be due Tuesday, October 11 at midnight.

Agenda October 4 - Finish Demos and begin Collage

Today we will finish up the last demos and start your first project using Photoshop that you will do independently. I mentioned this project to you a couple weeks ago, but you will be creating a collage that depicts "A Day in the Life of a Mercy Student". You will need to take pictures that have a good composition, arrange and edit your pictures in Photoshop. I have shared a rubric with you in Google Docs.

You will need to start with a blank canvas that is 8.5 X 11 in. and make sure you give notice of copyright by placing "© 2011 Your Name" at the bottom or rotated along the side, with a very small font size, just like you would see in an advertisement in a magazine. I'll show you an example in class. You will have two classes to work on this project. Next class you will need to bring pictures to work start adding to your collage. I encourage you to take more pictures than you think you need. That's the beauty of digital cameras...you can always delete what you don't use!