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So I have finally caught up with all my work, and I have some images to post!  Hurray!   I ran into trouble once I got my adobe project to the doc… apparently I didn’t resize my canvas properly – I had thouht that the canvas would adjust to the image I pulled into it, but apparently things work the other way around, so one of my images (the first one I made) had a super low resolution, which was laaaame.  I resized it as best I could but obviously once printed it is going to look a little pathetic.  It still looks good on the computer, but yeah, not really a ‘success’.  At least I caught the mistake in time to alter my second and third image – since I still had the original images, so I just dragged them to a new file and spent a few hours fiddling around to get them back to the way I wanted them.  Silly me not keeping my originals for the first image.  I mean, I had the original photos but not the edited versions where I had done all the tricky part of selecting and isolating the things I wanted.  Oh well, at the very least I learnt my lesson, and won’t be making that mistake again!  Also apparently the DOC was really busy today so I wont be able to pick up the finished product until tomorrow after class.  I’m nervous to see how the poorly sized image will look, probably very ‘soft’.  I used the bicubic smoothing option when resizing, so I hope at least it doesn’t look all pixilated.

My illustrator project went much better.  I decided to keep it really simple since I was so nervous about using the program, and as a result it turned out really clean and bold.  My cause is stopping cruelty to urban wildlife, and after some research I found that there wasn’t even a real organization for it!!  There is wildlife arc which is a branch of the bcspca but they work specifically on southern vancouver island, and there isn’t anything for greater vancouver, which I find amazing since our city is crawling with racoons, coyotees, pigeons and the like.  Basically it breaks my heart to see animals being mistreated even if they are scruffy little jerks going through the garbage, or living in the attic.  After many times witnessing unneccessary cruelty to the pigeons on Granville Island I decided to focus on that for the poster.  Everytime I thought to myself this issue isn’t a big enough deal to use, I should do something about homelessness or (ugh) upass inequality I would see something awful happening to the urban wildlife in my neighbourhood on my way home.  There are a group of jerky teens who hang out in the park near my house, and just last week they were shooting potatoe guns at a family of raccoons.  A few days ago I witnessed from my window, them shooting roman candles at a skunk that had crawled into an old water heater that my neighbour threw out.  I couldn’t believe it!  The poor thing had no escape, and it couldn’t even spray them since they were attacking it from several meters away.  If anyone deserves to get skunked…  A few days after thinking of this cause, and this project I witnessed some small children kicking, and grabbing the pigeons outside the market.  Their parents looked on happily discussing how much ‘fun’ their kids were having with the birds.  It blew my mind that perfectly reasonable people might not even think of ‘vermin’ as animals.  I guarentee you those same people would not find it very ‘fun’ if they saw their kids kicking and harrassing puppies.  When I was a kid a boy I knew came to my house where we were playing in my backyard.  We couldn’t have been more than 7, and we were having a great time playing croquet.  A crow landed closeby and this kid gets a maniacle look in his eye as he runs up and swings with his croquet stick at the crow.  Either through sheer bad luck or freakish 7 year old accuracy he clubbed the thing in the head, cracking it’s skull and killing it.  I of course immediatly started to cry and accused him of murder, but his only response was that crows were ‘pests’.  He also told me about how his dad lets him help ‘poison the squirrels’ in their attic.  I’m sorry, but there are so many humane ways to remove pests from your house/garden these days that I find it comepletely uneccessary and awful to just kill them all indescriminatly.  In my opinion that kid was well on his way to being a sociopath.  Now maybe I’m just a bleeding heart but I consider all living things to be sacred and worthwhile.  I don’t kill bugs even.  While I see the necessity of say killing cows for meat, I do not think that gives people the right to abuse and mistreat said cow.  Basically killing animals or even just harrassing animals for personal pleasure is twisted and sick.  The difference is necessity.  As a species we are even startin to grow beyond the necessity for even killing animals for meat as new and better fake meat products are developed!  Why people would consider certain animals to be superfluous enough to simply kill them and mistreat them is beyond me.  Sure there are millions of pigeons, that doesn’t make it okay to boot one across the market.  Sure there are tons of rabbits all over Victoria, that doesnt make it okay to shoot them with crossbows as a group of boys did in my first year there.  There are better and more humane ways to curb the population growth of urban animals, the fact is these acts are simply for personal amusement of the human perpetrating them, and that is just plain old NOT OKAY.

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