Olympic Medal Design

This is the final product of the medal seen in my last post. I've already entered this into the competition and have recieved an E-Mail confirming that it's valid. I will post a link to vote for this (or another medal if you like another one better) as soon as the voting opens.
Basically, I finished the curler, added the mountains, added colour, added the Olympic rings, and added the lettering. Every visible layer has Bevel and Emboss turned on. I also messed with Opacity to emphasize the illusion that the curler is close and the ski jumper is distant.

In Progress...

Mr. Sands has allowed anyone doing well in his class, including me, to do basically whatever we want (as long as we actually make computer art). I have decided to enter the medal design contest for the 2012 Youth Winter Olympics. Here's what I have so far:

Obviously the curler needs work. These are the only athletes I'm planning on putting on the medal, but there might be some other people.

Unbelievable School

As promised last week. Basically this is a picture I took of the school put onto a cloudy background and blended in a bit.

Reverse Engineering #2

Mr. Sands gave us a day for catching up, and for those of of us who weren't behind, he assigned another reverse engineering assignment. He showed a picture similar to this one and gave us a picture of a lion to work with. I used Blur to soften the image, a Radial Gradient to make the blue edges, a brush for the snow, and Saturation on the eyes.

Ideas...

Mr. Sands has assigned us to brainstorm 10 ideas for a picture entitled Unbelievable School and gave us a link to a website for the general idea. At least one of these will probably show up on this weblog next week:

1. A school on a floating island.
2. A campus that is being rolled up, like in the movie Inception.
3. A school on top of a skyscraper or two. Unfortunately, the ideal buildings for this idea were destroyed in 2001.
4. A school hanging upside-down from a cloud.
5. A school built the right way up on a cloud.
6. Wayside School (sideways).
7. A tiny planet made entirely of the school grounds.
8. A tiny school (probably in the middle of a forest of grass).
9. Hogwarts (if I can find a way to do it without plagiarizing).
10. A floating school.

Advertising the Revolution

Mr. Sands asked us to create 3-D images of one of our simplified images. Since the idea was basically to have a logo, I think the assignment implied advertising. You can't really advertise a revolution the same way you would some other things, so I started with making the ring, which looks a bit like the rubber bands some clubs at my school (in particular, the ones that send money overseas to stop genocides or whatever). I then tried to Warp the image and make it into a banner:

I don't know how to make good wrinkles in Photoshop yet.

After this I needed one more, so I made a pop can, although I can't imagine why a logo for the Middle East revolutions would end up on a pop can:

I created the can and ring using a basic Photoshop tool. I thought the ring turned out well and the banner and the can turned out okay.

For Mr. Sands:

The 3-D shape generator on Photoshop gave me mixed results. It worked well for the ring and can but not for a hat or cone. If I did this again I might try to figure out how to change the colour of the pop can. The hardest part was trying to Warp the logo so that it looked like it was on a banner. I learned how to use the "3-D shape from Layer" feature in Photoshop.

Theme Project

As anyone with an Internet connection, newspaper, television, or radio knows, the Middle East is currently experiencing a wave of revolution that has deposed the formerly permanant "Presidents" of Tunisia and Egypt and started a civil war in Libya. Mr. Sands had the class make a picture with a theme, so I chose the situation in the Middle East. I found pictures from the Internet of protests in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Bahrain (where thousands of protestors are being attacked by government and Saudi forces), Iran (where protests against Ahmedinejad's rigged election in 2009 have been revived), Jordan, Algeria, and Morocco, made a collage out of them, and used some layer effects, the select tool, and Copy and Paste to make the word Revolution. Mr. Sands then had us reduce the picture to only 4 colours. With a picture as detailed as this one, it didn't work very well:

If you blow it up a bit you might be able to see the individual photos. I did this using the Threshold filtre. Mr Sands also had us simplify the picture. This was really easy to do; all I had to do was change the opacity of one of my layers:

And then we had to create one with simplified shapes, like a logo. I applied a Cutout filtre:

It worked much better than the 4-colour one.

As usual, the 6 answers:

I thought my original picture turned out quite well. The layer effects I applied to the text layer really worked in setting it apart from the background, especially combined with the 25% opacity white layer I had on top of the background. I tried a number of things to make the 4-colour one that didn't work, including using Cutout and trying a bunch of colour settings. The Cutout did work for making a logo. If I had to do this again, I would not arrange the photos in a way that would allow really obvious transitions like at the bottom of the 't', 'i', and 'o'. The hardest part was easily making the 4-colour picture. It still didn't turn out well. To make these, I discovered Layer Fill (which was set to 0% for the text layer) and Cutout.