Summer Classes-

Hello!!
It has been way to long since my last post, I have been busy working!! I had my textiles class in June and it went well, I pulled out an A in that class. However, I am now in Photoshop/Sketchup and I want to cry, just a little bit. I kind of knew it was going to be hard after a senior in my textiles class told me that the only way I could get through Photoshop/Sketchup is with my bible but I underestimated her exaggeration. We are practically teaching ourselves...from a book. My teacher will "lecture" (roughly show us) what we will be "learning" in the chapter for the day and then she lets us get to work doing the exercises for the chapter. It has gotten better, since I now know where most of the tools are but the first few days were ROUGH. The book would say "hold down the ctrl key and click the Add Mask Layer at the bottom of the layers palette" doesn't sound that hard to the average Photoshop user but when you don't know what the heck the layers palette is or that these tiny little buttons on the very bottom of this "layers palette" even exist, this task is some what difficult. The first full day of working in Photoshop began at 9 AM after an hour lecture of how to begin in Photoshop, and ended at 3 pm. After 6 hours of work, I finally finished all 23 exercises AND the DIY (Do Independently Yours-a little thing my teacher made up to torture us. Just kidding, in actuality, it is an assignment that uses the skills that we "learned" in the chapter. For example, the first day we had to create 3 greeting cards using the skills of a pattern, a mask, a gradient and a knockout. By the time I had finished all the exercises, I had a small understanding of how to do use a pattern and a mask, however the gradient and the knockout I was lost. So of course, I looked it up on google and found a wonderful website with tutorials about these, and many other lessons. Today, was day number 2 of week 2, however yesterday (day 1 of week 2) my teacher was sick so we did not do any exercises but had a reading assignment. I spent the day catching up on sleep and watching movies (I had already read the chapter for that day). So today we did what we were suppose to do yesterday, but tonight we must read the chapter that we should have done today (Chapter 6) PLUS the chapter that we are suppose to do tomorrow (Chapter 9). It is a lot of reading, but there is only one exercise in Chapter 9. So my optimistic teacher is cramming 2 days into one tomorrow in hopes to give us Thursday to do our Photoshop project, which I have no idea what that will entail. I have a better handle on what Photoshop is and it is really cool to see what you can do with it but it is going to be a long 3 and a half weeks.

Today, we took a floor plan from CAD and brought it into Photoshop to add the ceramic tile, the mahogany counter tops, the bar stool texture, the carpet,etc. to render the floor plan. This is why Photoshop is being used more rapidly in the Interior Design field, we can take the floor plan, or elevation of a room, and bring in the EXACT carpet, wall covering, couch, table, etc. to give the client a better idea of what the space will look like, rather than a hand drawn, rough idea of what the room may look like. As much as they try we can not replicate the exact texture of a certain carpet or wall covering. I'll be learning how to do that in the fall, I'm not particularly looking forward to that.

Well, I guess I'm done ranting about how hard school is now, and I'll get back to reading my chapters for tomorrow. I hope you all have a wonderful, blessed day and will post again soon, hopefully with pictures next time. It's hard to post pictures of Computer Aided Drafting stuff but I will try!!

-Emily