This project was influenced by the topics in the course this week, with the pen tool and saving path selections. I didn’t have a lot of ideas. This is what came to me first.

Contrast: I wanted the tree to really contrast the scene, a desolate, destroyed city. Light and darkness. Life and decay. That sort of thing. I went through two different trees, the other was a bit more spry, but both of them were difficult to see against the backdrop of the buildings? Which is why I opted for a vignette, to really highlight the tree. I also chose red text with a drop shadow to make it really pop.

Repetition: Down by the base of the tree, I cloned some rubble to make it seem as though it is sprouting from between the bricks.

Alignment: I wanted everything to be center aligned. The original background image is actually quite large which allowed me to have a lot of freedom with where I put the tree, so I decided where the tree would fit best and then I cropped it from there to fit this poster style.

Proximity: The text in particular I kept pretty close together.

Font: I used Franklin Gothic Heavy, and the reason for that is because it feels very reminiscent to me of those black border, motivational posters for some reason. At any rate, I also liked how bold and powerful it felt when I put the quote in all caps.

Color: Color was a bit tricky with this one. I really wanted the background to be quite bleak and then have the tree really pop out at ya. So I did some tweaking with the levels and curves to really accent that. Though, I didn’t think the sky fit. So I changed it out with the replace sky feature for something that was a bit softer that fit the tree a bit better. I used the red color in the font as somewhat of a direct opposition to the green of the tree. Red also does a great job of catching the eye, and is one of those power colors.