With this composition, I started with the by removing the background of the baseball. That took a little bit of time to get the edges to look decent, I used the smart object tool to select and mask. Once I had the ball how I liked it, I added it onto the match stick. I used the multiply option in the layers panel to place the baseball, and ended up loving the way it 
looked merging the two objects that I kept it that way, playing a little bit with the contrast 
in the adjustments panel. For the title, I love “Strike One” is so universally known in baseball as well as with a match.

A clock was another one of my sketches that I thought would be fun to play around with. I 
started by taking the stitching off of a baseball using the quick selection too. I played around with the lacing on the clock manipulating the shape to mimic the hands on a clock but ended up reverting back to the original shape of the stitching. I did get rid of the end of the stitching because they were a little too curved and shadowed. "Time Out" was the title I selected for this composition.

What’s more American than Baseball? This was the first idea I had and knew it was 

something I wanted to create. I played around creating the stripes of the American flag out of baseball stitching, but felt like it was going away from my object a little too much. With this composition, I found an image of a flag and re-sized it to fit my composition. From there I found a baseball, removed the background by using the quick selection tool. I did end up removing the star since the points showed a little bit behind the baseball. The name for this composition came from the popular phrase that claims baseball as “America’s National Pastime”.

This composition was inspired by another common phase I hear my husband tell our sons, “Keep your eye on the ball”. An eye was part of my sketches early on and I really like how it came together. With this composition, I created a smart object to remove the background with the quick selection tool, scaled it down to the size of a pupil, and layered it on top of the eye.

My children are often a source of my inspiration, this idea came from one of my son’s favorite bedtime stories, “Good Night Baseball”. I started this composition by stripping the stitches off of a baseball using the quick selection tool, this took a lot of time to get the shadows where the laces go into the ball. From there I layered it on top of an image of the moon and decided to call it “dream team”.

he inspiration for this composition came from listening to a coach at my son’s little league 
game, yelling “bring it home!” The Earth is the home to all of us so it seemed like the perfect fit. To create this composition, I started with a high resolution photo provided by NASA and extended the black background. From there I found a baseball, created a smart object using the quick selection tool to highlight just the stitching, and then did select and mask. I finished by merging the two images together and made some minor adjustments to the contrast and opacity.

For this composition, I started by partially removing the one side of the baseball by creating a smart object, using the direct selection tool, and adding or taking away the area around the laces. That was the part that took the longest because I wanted all of the laces, but not the part of the ball in between each lace. I originally had the cut out part placed over a scoop of vanilla ice cream, but decided to find a new image with an additional scoop and a cone. The caption “Going, Going, Gone” is a reference to a home run in baseball. I feel that it ties into ice cream because everyone always finishes their ice cream.

Through this project the first thing I learned was to be less intimidated with Photoshop. While there is still so much I need to learn, I am a lot more confident and willing to learn through my mistakes. I learned to have patience with myself and to ask for help. I learned that everyone interprets art differently and that titles and descriptions can help us understand why people do the things they do in art. I will continue to apply the Photoshop skills I learned during this project into my future projects.