Gizmo's Projects

Ahh....it is lovely to have had at least part of my evening spent at home and not playing chauffeur. To celebrate, I figure I should post up Gizmo's latest Photoshop project.

Her take on the same photo that Spike had used earlier (it is the photo being used for their current large assignment).

She had a blast playing with the Gradient Map adjustment layer. During some of her free time, she decided to play around with one of her own photos.

Fell off the gluten wagon...

Times have been busy here, and I am still not through with my allergy elimination diet. Like a sucker, I put soy sauce on my Mongolian barbecue when we went out to dinner, completely forgetting that it was not okay. I certainly paid for that mistake. It has been about two weeks and the nausea is still lingering. Since we need a quick answer on what I can and can not eat, I am just going to bite the bullet and get the bloodwork done. Tomatoes and eggs seem to be alright, since I have tried those and felt just fine, so that is something to be happy about.

Life doesn't slow down though, even when you feel like it should. Although we did miss playgroup and chess one week, the kiddos were very understanding. We are not back in full force with Girl Scouts, swimming, chess, playgroup and....as of tonight....I have found Spike a Webelos pack (ya know, the younger Boy Scouts). Hurray! Happy kids make all the running around worth while, even if it wears me out.

I thought I would share part of Spike's photoshop work from today with you. We had a nice one-on-one lesson while Squirt napped, Princess played, and Gizmo was off with her book club. This isn't the main assignment we are working on, but just something I let him play around with for fun. The photo is one of the practice photos we receive with our Practical Photoshop magazine subscription.
The original looks like this:

Learning Photoshop

It will come to no surprise to anyone who knows us that our kids are pretty tech savvy. Even Squirt loves to play on my iPad. And so, taking their interest in computers in mind, Brady got them a super cool surprise for this school year by ordering Adobe CS5 master suite.

The suite includes many adobe programs, like Illustrator, Premiere, and Photoshop, which is what I chose to start with. We have our digital art and photography day once a week, and the kids really look forward to it. Adobe has a wonderful website with many tutorials. These have been really nice for teaching the kids the basics. We also got a subscription to a Photoshop magazine, but we are not ready for that quite yet. It has been a blast so far and I really look forward to seeing what the kids can do over the school year.

I usually have them work on the example photo from the video, and then on one of their own. For today's lesson, we started to learn about adjustment layers. The kids were to add a black and white layer to their photos, change the opacity of the layer, and then chose some area to mask the layer. Spike was giggling while working on the lesson photo as he made the mans head the only thing colored in the photo.

Here are their pictures before and after editing.

Gizmo

Spike

Just for fun, Gizmo decided to play around with Photoshop and do another picture.