Naturally Worldly: A Junior Experimental Project by Katherine Higgins (2013)

I am exploring the feeling of worldliness I get from living in nature. This applies to many parts of my life: our chickens and goats, barefoot hikes in the hills. However, none of these activities require me to travel very far. This is represented in my composition by the world map constrained to the border of California, with a heart marking where California would be in the world. Additionally, I used a photo that I took during my first few weeks of Freestyle as a parallel to returning to your roots and going back to nature.

To make the photo distract less from the main focus of the composition - the map - I took it into Adobe Photoshop and reduced the saturation, increased the exposure, and decreased the contrast. This made the photo look older, and more washed out. To create the map, I opened the photo in Illustrator, then put the map on new layers above the photo. I freehanded California, the water, and the heart with the paintbrush tool. I used the pen tool to outline, and fill, the continents so that they would look more precise and recognizable than my pathetic attempts at freehanding Australia.