Well, here’s to making a new post after saying I’d do so forever ago haha.
College is going great. I’m learning a lot in Art History and am reenforcing my Design Elements in 2d Design. Not much to say but that! I finished up our “line” project and it was interesting to struggle with something I could *easily* do in Illustrator (inking with a bamboo calligraphy pen is no fun some times…). But this week we are moving onto SHAPE.
Anyway, the poster in the thumbnail was something I did for my cousin, Ali. Her beauty school is doing something with awards or something and she was put in charge of doing the poster. So she did the smart thing and commissioned me 
That’s the finished version, but if anyone has anything to critique I welcome it!!…
So awhile ago, the “official” facebook page for SmackDown! uploaded a picture of one of the wrestlers with a little caption on it. Everyone was commenting on it stating how excited they were and how much they loved that wrestler…
But, all I could look at was the atrocity sitting before me on my computer screen.
You’d think if it was an “official” facebook, you’d have professionals making the content they post on their page. Apparently not. I was baffled at the lack of… pretty much everything graphic designers apply to make their images look “pretty”. I’m not considered a graphic designer, but there was no way I was going to let this slip. I had to atleast ATTEMPT to improve this… garbage.
So I immediately took it into Photoshop. First thing I noticed was that it was a dinky 698×462 jpeg, and the pixelation was intense. Not much you could really do to help it there, though (they didn’t have a higher resoulution anywhere). Next was to rid this perfectly fine image with the horrific text scattered mindlessly around it. Using the skills I learned today actually, I used content-aware fill to remove a bulk of the pixelated trash and used the clone stamp to clean up. (It took forever though, Adobe made a pretty magical tool, but there are some glitches they need to fix…)
Pretty good so far.
Next, I used the marque tool to make a feathered trim around the edge to really make it pop. It took less then a minute.
After that back breaking work, it was time to enhance the image. It was so dull, I used “curves” and “hue/saturation” to really bring the color out of it.
Then the text. Looking at the original, I think it’s biggest flaw was color choice. Red, green, black, and white on a blue background… there’s not much consistency there… So I stuck with white, since it’s easy to read on the background and goes along with it as well. Another flaw I saw was that it was random typefaces, so I chose a single font “Boycott” and used only that and dropped in a drop shadow to help readability.
I know it isn’t “perfect”, but I think it’s a huge improvement from the original…
(I edited the text just now. Hopefully it’s easier to read!)
(I edited the quote to what he actually said, so hopefully it makes sense now!)
