Big Machine: A Senior Explorations Amplified Piece by Stephen Adams (2014)

For my amplified piece, I took a drawing I made with colored pencils and gave it a dreamy effect using various filters. The drawing is of an alien race crash landing on a planet already inhabited by other aliens, these native aliens are looking on as ghost like creatures walk towards them. My piece is symbolic, it represents an extraordinary circumstance, my blink write had to do with the idea that the life we live, while it might seem mundane much of the time, really is extraordinary, and that there are so many things to be excited about and thankful for. In my amplified piece, I have a picture of a person in the foreground pointing towards one of the incoming ghost aliens. In the background on a hill in the distance, a group of the natives also watch in wonder. The point I am trying to get across in my piece is that in almost any circumstance it is always possible to step back and say ''that's amazing.'' Whether it be referring to life in general or specific things, even in the most trying of times, there is almost always something to point at and say ''It's a beautiful world.''

The new technique I used was creating a ''soft glow'' on parts of the image. The goal of that was to give the image a dreamy quality. The new font I used was ''Escape Great'' because it has a very stand out quality, and I wanted that because I had the opacity lowered on the font. The new plugin I used was the ''CircusDaze'' plugin because it allowed me to add more dreamy effects to the photo and manipulate the feeling it produces.