Create a visually intensive remake of the passage by fusing together three digital images and overlaying the new three panel image with a phrase or series of words. Choose images carefully. Highlight components of the images by cropping and resizing them in Picnik, a free online image editing application. Your work should create a style rich interplay between images and words.
Imagetext Triptych
Remake note: Pollan's passage suggests a philosophical clash between the mechanization of big, industrial-scale farms; health-conscious, everyday consumers, and the food products we consume daily. Products do not explain themselves; by design, their creation is murky. This imagetext triptych stems from these tensions. The John Deere combine (left) is shown through a two-tone filter of maroon and light green to suggest the duality of industry (all good or all bad). The second panel shows features a nameless consumer shopping in Whole Foods. The image was modified using a 50% focal zoom to make everything fuzzy other than the products on the shelves. At the right, tomatoes (a year-round staple of produce, abundantly available in the U.S.) have been intensified with a 30% boost. Their glowing redness, after all, entices consumers, supplanting other matters, such as the distance they have traveled to the store and pesticides applied to them. The words "industrial" and "organic" lay across the triptych. The "industrial" typeface (The Maple Origins) should suggest that "industrial" is only faintly visible in places like Whole Foods. The font emanates an organic quality--hollow, dirty around the edges. The geometrically frayed edges of the "organic" typeface (Prefix) implies a patchy and uneven concept, particularly where so-called "organic" products are implicated in large-scale, industrial production processes.
Resources:
Flickr Creative Commons
Picnik
Instructions
1. Search for three photos at Flickr Creative Commons.
2. Save the photos to your computer.
3. Go to Picnik.
4. Upload an image.
5. Resize the image to
200 (wide) by 500 (tall).
6. Save the resized image to your computer.
7. Repeat steps 4-6 for the other two images.
8. Upload the new image to Picnik. Apply filters to experiment with stylistic effects.
9. After you apply a desired effect, safe the image to your computer.
10. Once you have all three filtered image panels on your computer, go to Picnik and select "Collage." Collage will allow you to combine all three images into one.
11. Add text (with two different typefaces) to the three-panel image.
12. Save your collage with text overlay to your computer.
Reminders
! Save copies of all files while you are working. This allows you to change your work easily and without entirely starting over.
! Ask for help.
! Remember that you are seeking to amplify (to heighten, to intensify) the passage's style.
! Apply three different image filters to the panels (one filter to each photo, no more, no less). Apply at least two typefaces to the words or phrases overlaying the triptych. Keep notes on the filters and typefaces you used.