Reflection~

• Presentation contains accurate/reasonable ideas on how technology can help those in your career area reach their goals.
• Using technology to create interactive experiences for your audience.
• Using technology to “show” rather than simply “tell” about your work/product/ideas.
• Using technology to help your audience establish a personal connection w/ main ideas.
• Describing your process to learn new technologies including struggles you encountered.
• Your rationale for the use of specific technologies in your presentation - as blog post

So those were the requirments, I hit most of them I think, I should have emphasized the struggles a bit more, I sort of made them sound too easy with the way I presented. I was limited on time and I didn't expect photoshop to have so many problems projecting onto an external monitor..in retrospect I should have just used the 1 screen but I couldn't really have known.

The use of photoshop in my field derives from a basic need. I just Have to learn it, its one of the 1st requirements on any application for artists looking for a career. Other digital media programs like illustrator and Corel draw are also popular, and many employers look for experience in all of the programs. I tried to show the partnership that a Drawing tablet has with the program, and how they were basically made for each other, unfortunately the technical difficulties we had made it kind of hard to show off. My idea for the presentation was to show just how simple things can be though when you are experienced, I wanted the class to pull up some images and my hope was to combine them on screen in a rather simple way, using 2-4 of the images, however that proved difficult with the monitor, so instead i just added a filter to it to show the way the computer emulates other material. I turned a landscape into a charcoal drawing however the color was off, had a flesh tone still selected when i applied the filter so it was harder to see.

When i showed off a drawing I had worked on for the presentation i showed how layers worked, with the idea that even if you mess up, its a simple fix by using the tools available. Can undo about 20-30 moves just by hitting a button, can erase a layer if something doesn't look right, etc. All faster more efficient ways to do things that you can't necessarily do with physical media. If i needed to fix something in a painting it might take hours of repainting an area, or days to weeks if using oil paints.

I wanted to get across that with the rise of digital media we've been making trade offs in art. Why use physical media if digital is so much better? That question has plagued many a young artists mind especially when considering costs. The Photoshop program as well as my tablet probably only cost roughly the same as all the supplies for my 1st year of painting class. So in the long run I was saving money using the program, paper, pens, paint, brushes etc are all very expensive. The computer program can emulate things like brushes, watercolor, charcoal, etc and make very beautiful works, but you do lose a lot when making that switch to digital. The life of your piece loses some time, many think digital is forever and while its true it can/will last a long time if you take the proper steps, digital work wont be your own for long. There are a lot of "thieves" online, some will take your work, change a few things, perhaps remove your signature etc. If you don't have enough fame online, you may never even know that its happening.

All in all though I think the use of photoshop for this presentation was the right idea, and I had a couple people ask interesting questions, relating it to their own majors/careers. I think i accomplished what I set out to with the presentation and got across my ideas.