First Task - Create three designs based on a theme

As the title says; for the first task I had to decide upon a theme and create three different images based upon it. I was very enthusiastic to begin this task as I haven't had much practise with Photoshop before and was excited to start improving my skills.

With my limited knowledge of the program I didn't want to try to be too ambitious to begin with and rather used this as an opportunity to get familiar with Photoshop's tools, therefore I decided upon a simple theme of

day and night. To make it a little more interesting I put the sun in a dark night and the moon in daylight.

I began by getting a picture of the sun and moon from the internet to study and then used these as a reference.

This is my first attempt. I used another picture of the sky and then used the eyedropper tool to match it to my background.

After getting a moon from the internet I found an image of a confused face and lowered the opacity and saturation to make it blend. It was hard to show it was daylight with just a simple, blue background so I added a flock of birds.

Overall I was disappointed with my final design, mainly due to its quality but also because of reasons pointed out to me by my learning team. One of the comments was that the face in the moon doesn't make sense. He doesn't look that "confused" which on reflection I see their point. Although visually it was a failure, I learnt a lot about some tools on Photoshop such as: the pen tool, adjusting colours, opacity and the magic wand.

My second design was a slight improvement on my first. It was more visually exciting as there were more elements and colour. This design helped me to focus on using filters.

My final image combined the new skills I'd learnt from the other designs.

Overall I am pleased with how this task developed. Although my designs weren't visually the best I have learnt a lot about Photoshop. If given the opportunity to do it again I feel that I could considerably improve these designs.