My intended audience is young adults of various backgrounds who have experienced difficulties fitting in and establishing connections with others. Maybe the viewer experienced culture shock in a new environment, or even struggled to find a comfortable community. Since the image shows cultural connection, it might appeal more to those struggling culturally. Through this image, I suggest that the universal nature of music can be used to bridge our differences and help build a sense of belonging. By presenting music this way, it encourages the audience to learn a musical instrument which will in turn bring about opportunities to become engaged and find commonalities with others. When it comes to learning music, I feel that most other calls to learn music focus on the individual, appealing to the notion that "learning a musical instrument can make you smarter," or "it builds your confidence," but I'm showing that learning music is more than this. In fact, music can be a way to express yourself emotionally to those around you, transcending the horizons of a single individual.
There are a few major landmarks in this image that contribute to my message to the audience. Since I encourage others to learn an instrument, the piano in the bottom left provides a well-known example of one, helping establish my musical theme. The placement of the piano gives space for a musical staff to extend the width of the frame. Serving as the main symbol of unity, the staff is overlaid upon several different countries. It is this staff which provides the connection, wrapping up the countries, showing how music brings different cultures and people together. It also provides a separation of saturation, which is the final main feature of the image. Everything below the staff, besides the piano, is grayed out and blurred whereas everything above the staff is bright, clear, and vibrant. Saturation manipulation is used to explain that music is what brings "color" to the world. The portions without color are boring and unsatisfying, as is a lonely life with a lack of fellowship.
Photoshop tools helped me convey my message. For example, I used the selection tools to cut out the auditorium in the background and to move the piano from the center. To fill this background, I decided to use a collage of countries, which was a product of the crop tool. Each crop depended on each other since I planned on connecting the mountains in the background. Another useful tool was the spot healing brush tool, which helped remove the middle piano from the stage while leaving the stage behind it intact. Lastly, I used a saturation layer to fill in the spots where I wanted the color to "pop" and where I wanted it to fade. This was important since it made the staff a bit more profound than just simply connecting the countries. I first attempted to implement this saturation with a gradient, but the gradients weren't as flexible as the brush tool, which is what I used in the end.
Through this process, I learned that editing images takes much planning. It is one thing to have an idea, but if you can't plan out how you will execute the idea, it will be harder. Oftentimes I found myself struggling because I didn't think about how each component would interact with each other. However, I also found that the design process is very experimental, as in, sometimes ideas just simply wouldn't work. Though, even when one idea didn't come out the best, it usually sparked another idea whether from me or my peers. In terms of myself, I was able to reflect on the role that music has played in my life, which is why I feel strongly about learning an instrument. Music was how I met some of my best friends, and how I continue to meet and connect with new people. So, the project was a nice reminder of why I continue music.
Thinking ahead for the next project, I want to allocate more time to figuring out a concrete audience and purpose. I think that will help the project vision form quicker than it did for the photoshop project. Ideally, I would start planning as early as the first tutorial, using these tutorials to think of specific implementations for my ideas. Also, I might want to commit the skills in the tutorials to memory. With the photoshop project for example, even though I would learn a new skill, I had a hard time remembering it later on, so I would have to spend time going through the same tutorial again. Working on a few ideas based on a specific tutorial could potentially help this memorization hold. Lastly, it would be a good idea to get a draft done earlier so I can get as much feedback from people, and have more time to implement that feedback.