I have to attribute everything I knew when starting this project to my hours spent doodling on Windows Paint in grade school. That knowledge helped me quite a bit but there was definitely more to learn. Layers were unfamiliar territory and they turned out to be essential in all of my scratch works. In my 3rd project, the ‘forest’, every color of tree was on a different layer and I wouldn’t have been able to create it without the layer tool. The lasso tool and the rotate selection were also some fun gadgets to explore. Just sitting down and playing with Paintshop for a few hours increased my speed and skill as a graphic artist. There were times when a complicated series of actions led to a pleasing final result, but just as often I was surprised at how the simple tools could go a long way. There seems to be infinite possible results and a million techniques and directions to get there.
I never started with a plan… On all three I just randomly chose a color and tool and made a shape. A blue rotated rectangle for the ‘Hinge Hound’ that ended up being the jaw, a teal circle that started the ‘Cry Baby’s’ head, and a yellow triangle to begin my forest of color. After the head was made in ‘Cry Baby’ (at the time just a solitary teal circle on a blank canvas), I panted a black ellipse inside it, which informed me I was making a screaming person. After the teeth were put in it was clear that this was a large crying baby and the following arms, filthy shirt, and legs seemed obvious. The background was quite by accident; some color fading tool that if held in a certain way made black and white stripes.
I think my favorite image was scratch project #3: "Soon To Be Field" – Forest. I say WAS because I actually had about a half an hour of unsaved work that was lost from it and I had to send in an unfinished version. At the time when the software freaked out and I lost my work I had it to a where it was a lot more detailed with a more populated forest and a cut down tree lying by the stump.
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