Graphic Creation

The graphic tool I used for this project was Pixlr. I think the graphic tools that I will most often use for my website are image fixing tools: crop, resize, rotate, etc. I do not need super fancy graphics on my website the way I see it. My site is a resource for teachers, so I want it to be very useful and organized and not at all cluttered. I’m not saying my graphics don’t need to look good, but they don’t need to be high forms of art. I think that color adjusting tools are really fun to work with, but they can take your pictures from normal to silly very quickly (like turn everything to shades of green with one click.) The lasso tool was one that I didn’t anticipate using so much but I was proven wrong. It helped with a lot of the graphics I created. I was continually frustrated by paintbrush, pencil, sharpen, and smooth because they never did exactly what I thought they would do or what I wanted them to do. I kept trying to use them and then quickly abandon the attempt.

 

Being in schools there are often strict rules about pictures of students on the Internet. This is unfortunate because I love taking pictures of my kids while they are learning. Next year during my pilot, I might attempt to get a release form of some kind so I can post pictures, but for the time being, I make sure to take pictures of my students from behind to put online. I also like to use the filters to distort the pictures a bit as well, just to be safe. I used the emboss filter on both those images. I had a hard time finding just the right filter to change the picture but not make it “unreadable.” I will put pictures of my students learning throughout the site to demonstrate what we are doing in class. These kinds of pictures will be all over the site, not on a specific page.

I am really in love with how this picture turned out. I took this picture one morning before work. I knew I wanted this to be my header across the top of my site, so I cropped the image to the appropriate shape (which is kind of unfortunate because there were more pretty clouds at the top of the picture.) Then I super saturated the picture to really make the colors stand out, and I raised the contrast.

This graphic took me FOREVER to do. I had the image in my head and I just could not get pixlr to do what I wanted it to do. It was immensely frustrating. I finally got it close. 

He is our school mascot, but I wanted to tweak him to be the logo of my pilot program and my site. I used the lasso and pencil tools to remove the pick from his hands. I added color to his chest, beak, and helmet because he just looked unfinished without the extra color. I took and imported the picture of the iPad. It took me ages to figure out how to turn the iPad diagonally (not 90 or 180 degrees.) Then I seriously struggled with getting the canary to hold the iPad. I had to mess with the layers and watch a few tutorials. I finally figured it out and I am really happy with how it turned out.