Last weeks internship was a tough one. I was going through financial difficulties and transitions from an old job to a new job. This is only relevant because it’s truly difficult to juggle full time employment and part time internship. Non the less I was fortunate enough to be given the opportunity to work from home. Al understood the hardships I was facing and provided me with the opportunity to record my hours and work from the comfort of my home.
Similar to if I was headed to internship that morning I woke up at 7A.M. and got dressed and ready to head out. I brewed my morning coffee except that day I was going to work from home. Why get dressed then? I feel I work better if I treat my home like a personal studio. I rummaged through old videos turned on my Spotify to my favorite Hip-Hop album and started bumping it heavy.
The process started I grabbed the image of a model holding the barbell behind his head and dropped the file into Photoshop. I then proceeded to saturate the image, intensify the shadows and lighten up the mid tones. After I was satisfied with the way the image looked I then placed a gradient map using the colors black and transparent, and what this technique does is further intensify the shadows without affecting the highlights and only affecting the mid tones slightly. Pleased with the outcome i then posterized the image using only four colors. Explaining it is very fast but the entire process took about an hour to execute.
While running photoshop I opened up illustrator and dragged the photoshop file into the illustrator program. I then proceeded to trace the shadows of the posterized image using the pen tool. This process alone, you won’t believe, took a day and a half. The following step was adding the shadow spread. To explain what this looks like , they are the triangle lines at the end of the shadow. The mid tones were next for pen tool process and it was similar to the shadowing of the illustration, but instead of a black color I chose a tint of pink.
I chose impact as the font family because of it’s strength and masculinity. I kerned them closer because when you think of someone thats fit you think of “tight”, “in shape”, and I wanted to show that through the type. All and all working from home is difficult because theirs a lot of motivation at work, but I was pleased with the outcome and the poster in its entirety took me about 16 hours.
Dear Luigi,
I enjoy reading your journal entries because you have a very direct, personal way of expressing yourself. My best advice to you about your writing is to “sweat the details.” Basically, this means paying attention to some of the basics including punctuation, spelling and capitalization. This might sound like a lot, but I strongly recommend treating your first effort as a draft and let it sit overnight. Then read it with a critical eye, looking for errors that detract from the overall quality of your work. It will pay off in the long run. You already understand the effort needed to achieve a great result using software applications such as Photoshop and Illustrator. Take that same approach with your writing and you will see the difference.
Sincerely,
Professor Mason
Prof. Mason I just read your comments, I’ll be writing a bit slower and paying attention to the details of my writing.