Technology Problems

Finishing my AP Physics C class at 10:35, I went straight to the library to start converting my own photographs to illustrations. I decided that the easiest photos to convert would be the landscapes since there are not many details in these photos. Initially, I really liked the look of the pencil sketches as illustrations. However, I ended up falling in love with the watercolor look on a photo of a sunset at the lodge. So, I kept the theme consistent and converted the other pencil sketches to watercolor pieces. I also learned today that the watercolor effect does not look great with photos of people since there are so many details. I had to go through all of my photos from Ecuador and remove up-close photos of people from my Senior Project Illustrations folder. Having only an hour between class and lunch, I really just spent this time experimenting with different styles and effects.

            After lunch, I spent the rest of my day trying to apply the watercolor effect to my collection of photographs. Although this seems like a very easy process, it was actually the hardest task of my senior project thus far. Sketcher is a great application; however, I found out after converting at least ten photos that the program slowed down after each use. For each photograph, the program would take around ten minutes to apply all of the effects to the image. So, if I did not like the effects on the image, I would have to restart the ten-minute process to achieve the desired look of the illustration. Once I completed an illustration, I saved it in the Blurb software archive of photos to use for later. Since it took around twenty minutes total for each photograph, I only completed around twelve of my photographs today. After learning about how slow the process would be for converting all of my photographs, I begun to get a bit scared about the timeline of the senior projects. I had initially planned to order my book by the third week of April; however, I realized that this might be too ambitious of a task. I spent the rest of the night researching ways to speed up the Sketcher program – deleting unnecessary files, closing out applications, etc. Hopefully these tips will make tomorrow’s photo conversions much easier!