Major Project - Playing Catch-Up, Mommy Style: The Birthday Party

Photoshop

Playing Catch-Up, Mommy Style: 

The Birthday Party

  

So, it's been a little while since there was any sort of progress on my Major Project of learning Adobe Suite.  I admit it, it hasn't been on the top of my list lately.  You see, recently my daughter and I have reached the milestone of the "big girl bed" - right after watching her do an impressive yoga move to get one foot completely over the railing of her crib and smiling at me in a crazed future bungee-jumper sort of way.  That was it... thank goodness Papa (my Dad) is an accomplished carpenter and could whip up a toddler-bed conversion rail to transform her crib into a bed (they are supposedly available to buy and match her crib exactly, but Babies R Us never has it in stock!).  So Papa looked at the picture online and over the weekend made a perfect one.  Awesome.  Except... now my little chimpanzee has the freedom to climb in and out of her bed unassisted.  During the day she repeatedly goes back and snuggles with her stuffed animal menagerie for short periods of time - not napping, just relaxing for a moment.  At night... at, oh say, BEDTIME which until now has been a relatively uneventful 7:30 to 8:00 ritual... that bed becomes a lava-filled volcano of doom into which I spend an hour or two trying to coax my unwilling sacrifice.  She's thirsty. She wants another story.  She wants mommy to lie with her (i.e. contort myself into a nearly impossible yoga move of my own to accommodate her and said menagerie). She needs to reorganize her shoes. Look! The bed's a trampoline! One night she got up and disassembled the humidifier I had going because her nose is stuffy. I kid you not, on Wednesday at 9:37 I was exasperatedly watching her wolf down an impressive serving of meatloaf since she couldn't sleep because she was hungry.  I tried explaining that some day, probably when she has a toddler of her own, she will beg for the privilege of going to sleep.  She was unimpressed. And after consuming half her weight in leftover meatloaf she wanted to go play in her playhouse.  NO!!  So, the past 2 weeks, when I should have been working on homework after her bedtime, I have been negotiating with a tiny terrorist instead. 

I was able, however, to do a project that was slightly unrelated to my ultimate "mock bakery/party planning business" that I've been using her Wizard of Oz 1st birthday photos for.  I have been playing with my images on Photoshop for several hours, but don't have any finished products yet.  This week, however, I made her invitations for her 2nd birthday - which will be a "Chapter 2" storybook theme. The girl loves to read... so why not include all of her favorite characters?  I guess it is inadvertently related to my project, I mean I am planning a party. Although I'm sure I broke some sort of Creative Commons regulations by utilizing unlicensed characters (but I'm not making any profit off these things, I'm just throwing a party - spending money, actually!)  Still, this project involved cutting figures out of backgrounds, arranging text, resizing images and organizing them into a pleasing design... all basic components that I would be teaching an introductory graphic design course. Here's the front and back of my finished product - with identifying info blocked out, of course.

This took my a few hours - since I wasn't specifically doing this with the Project in mind, I forgot to time myself.  But I'd say 3 or 4 total between writing the amazing poem, finding and altering all the images and composing the two sides.  I didn't "record" the process either. But here's a step by step breakdown of what it took.  

1) I did the poem first and tried to incorporate as many books as I could think of - for the sake of proper citation I used Brown Bear, Brown Bear What Do You See? and The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Bill Martin Jr., Green Eggs and Ham and Cat in the Hat by Dr. Seuss, Where The Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendack, Madeline by Ludwig Bemelman, The Little Engine That Could by Watty Piper, If You Give a Mouse a Cookie by Laura Numeroff, Curious George by H A Ray, and Little Critter by Mercer Mayer.

2) I chose a Papyrus font and made separate text boxes for each line of the poem so I could easily manipulate them.

3) I found images of all the characters/books referenced. I used JPEGS.  Sometimes it was hard if there weren't any images of the character alone on a white background, just within the cover or page illustrations, so I had to carefully erase the backgrounds... which in the case of furry Critters or the detailed Engine that Could was a big pain but good practice I guess.  I learned that the higher the resolution of the image the easier it was to manipulate because if I zoomed in too far on a poor quality image it became almost too pixellated to identify or work with! Eventually I had each character on a transparent background so I could place them close enough to text without blocking some. 

4) Each character went on it's own layer, again, for ease of manipulation.  I arranged them around the text, paying careful attention to spacing, composition and keeping balance and harmony within the whole image. 

5) When I had started the invite I had intended it to be one sided, with a short poem and then all the necessary party info.  But as usual, I got carried away with the creativity aspect and was (gasp!) enjoying myself working with the computer. So the poem went long and required it's own side.  Luckily, I remembered my graphic artist friend who has access to all sorts of cool printing stuff could easily hook me up with a small amount of my fabulous invitations at little or no cost. 

6) So I started on the front, using the same font and characters I made a short little snippet phrase, a Chapter 2 heading, and incorporated the Where, When, and RSVP info. I had fun manipulating the text, making some vertical, some horizontal.  Doing my best to keep the text justified (evenly spaced in length) within their boxes, I applied the artistic "rule" of 3s and 4s (compositions look best if ajor elements are repeated 3 or 4 times) and made 3 text boxes (4 if you include the Chapter 2).  It's funny how even in graphic design, all the stuff I learned as a painter comes back to me naturally.  I didn't really do this stuff on purpose, looking back they were subconscious decisions. I'm going to have to remember if I'm ever teaching that these principles of design will not be inherent knowledge for most students and I'll have to tailor my lessons accordingly. 

7) I emailed both rendered (flattened and not-easily-changed but ready-to-print) JPGS and the unrendered PSD files to my friend (in case he needed to alter something or incorporate a bleed line (the space to be left blank on a printed design to accommodate a printer offset and cutting).  Within a few days I had my creations in hand.  It was then I noticed I had completely forgotten to include a time on the invitation.  I'm attributing this to exhaustion.   

8) So, out came the Sharpie and I hand-wrote in my best Papyrus imitation "2pm" on 30 invitations. Fun stuff. I guess I learned the necessity of good proofreading - although to be fair, I looked at it, my mom looked at it, and my printer looked at it... no one caught it!  Still, it pays to be more careful. 

So that's it.  My unintentional learning experience that stemmed from a real-life need.  Love it when things work out like that.  Now, if you'll excuse me, I actually have the opportunity to crawl into my own lava-free "big girl" bed and get some sleep because the chimpanzee is napping. I'm gonna need it... tonight the battle begins anew...