Groom Shot First!
With this week’s video, and Groom’s current location and status unknown, I wanted to take the time to illustrate how I’d foresee him handling himself in a cantina. Yes, that cantina. In case you’re unaware of the “Han Shot First” meme, that and my general love for all things done a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away… were my inspirations for my take on the Professor Groom Poster assignment.
I started by taking Professor Groom’s photo from here, and a screenshot from A New Hope during the cantina scene from here. I opened the cantina scene photo in GIMP first. Then, I opened the photo of Professor Groom in a separate project in order to lasso the right portions without disrupting the background. It was gigantic. I had to scale it down so many times manually because if I’d not done so, it would have been off of the viewing grid for the cantina scene (which, I’ll admit I still don’t know how to change; I know how to get around it, so it’s not much of an issue).
I then starting using the Move, Scale, Perspective, Shear, and Rotate tools to try to get our MIA professor to defend himself. Using all of these tools, and in rapid succession, helped me become much more fluid in my creation process with GIMP. I’ve learned their respective shortcuts because I was tried of moving my mouse for some of the minute changes I was making on the fly. After I got his face situated over Han’s, I used the Smudge and Blur tools to try to get it to sit in properly. The color’s off, but I have absolutely no clue how to do that, or even if that can be done in GIMP–my search results were barren.
Overall, I think it turned out decently. I’m no pro, but I can’t expect myself to magically become one without projects like these helping me to take steps in the right direction. It made me really interested in learning about Photoshop now, but that’s too expensive for my budget, so GIMP will have to suffice–I’ve probably only scratched the surface of the capabilities of GIMP anyhow.
This assignment was worth 4.5 points.