Digital and Social Media Adaptation

 This is my Zombie that I created using one of the lines from Ode to an Orange. This line because it was gruesome and powerful made me think of Zombies. I create this Zombie on Adobe Illustrator and I have played around with it before and I often just find tutorials and follow them. This is one of the first complete projects that I have done by myself. This project helped me understand texts, processes, and literacies because this program is new to me I did not really know everything about it. That lack of knowledge helped me understand what I needed/wanted to know to better utilize this program. Literacy is a big one because within illustrator as a creator I get to make a lot of decisions, but I often don’t know what I am doing or how it is changing my project. One thing that is a big idea that one needs to understand fully is the difference between Vector and Raster. Photoshop is done in Raster. Raster means that the pixels are done in horizontal and vertical rows; which means that when the image is resize the quality isn’t what the original image was. Illustrator is done in Vector. Vector has pixels in mathematical lines and curves so that regardless of if you scale it up or down the quality stays the same. Another literacy one has to have if one is going to work with Illustrator is a literacy of the tools. Illustrator has so many tools and if I knew where they were and what they do I could’ve done a lot more. A process that I have learned and utilized for this project was the process of making shadows. That is something that I have only done once before but was able to try and do in this projects as well. That process consists of creating a shape and them making two copies of it. You position the two copies so that the bottom copy has the part that you want to become the shadow and then the second copy is on top covering the part that you do not want. Then you click on Minus Front and then it deletes the second copy and the part it was covering so you have just a sliver of the original shape. You then make this black and take the opacity down to 10% you can then lay it over the original shape and it creates a shadow. This is process can be used for any project, but first you have to know it. With each program/genre/subject there are different literacies, texts, and processes we need to know, but I also believe that in order to understand these aspects of learning within a particular field we have to engage with them. We have to engage with them and accept that we are learning and that we don’t know everything yet.