After I photoshopped the pictures, I played around with several effects and especially with the background. It's still unfinished but the general idea is already established.
Instead of just placing the final picture presented in class, I've included my progression just working within photoshop.
Love:As my first piece, this took a lot of effort. I had to find multiple pictures of trees in the right shape and adjust the branches to form the lettering properly. Scouting, naturally, was difficult.
-After receiving input that the trees look too dead, I added more colour, and removed the inner part of the R as it seemed unnecessary and causing clutter.
- This was a rough draft reflecting the original design, to give myself an idea of what next to work on and how it would look.
- For the next few I added more leaves and colour to give more life to it. I tried switching around the backdrop to add more natural elements aside from just trees/roots. But I also faced the problem of the background taking away the effect of the text as trees.
- I removed some of the leaves from the letters E and C as it looked a little too crowded.
- I plan to further correct the backdrop, possibly going back to the original idea of the butterfly and ribbons/waves, but probably only with soft outlines so it's light and not distracting. If that doesn't work, I'll likely leave it blank. (I just don't fancy empty white spaces!)
Hate:
I switched the lettering for R to a sword with a katana across it, as it was too difficult to decipher the lettering when I used rifles.
I experimented with several effects and found most of them wouldn't fit in the font because the letter R was particularly small and looked ugly enlarged.
The 'E' didn't seem to fit with the other font so I edited it as you will see in the next picture. I liked the effect of the 2nd torn 'E' and realised that all the violent effects that I found couldn't be fit into the text itself because it took away the uniformity and the metallic effect of the text.
I had 2 problems with the letter 'R'. When the sword was in full length, it distorted the effect of looking like R. When shortened, it didn't look like a sword. So I fixed it here by breaking the length into shards so the main part is bolder to allow the 'R' effect to come through.
I also thought the 'A' being in the same format as 'B' and 'E' made too much of the text uniform, which in effect made the other letterings look out of place - like I just put it there because I could. So I changed it and was particularly pleased with the effect of a sniper stretching across a neat left half of the 'A'.
Aside from the text being a little too small, I was quite happy with the effect of this piece, but needed feedback as to whether there was too much going on in the background.
The tutorial group was quite divided on this. Some said the chaos perfectly reflected the idea, which was what I had in mind. But the others said it was a little distracting.
I plan to try to make the font larger and incorporate the effects into the text itself.
If this doesn't work, I will likely try to make the font slightly larger and take out some of the grey in the background but leave the effects there. I like how they make the idea of violence resonate throughout, making the entire paper an artpiece. "my name is" and "i hate violence" would be stranded otherwise.
I really like most of the effects of the bullets and glass smashing because of how it effectively conveys violence. But some of these would make the text unreadable and that defeats the purpose.
I have to find a way to bring the elements together.
This is somewhere in between the spectrum of simplicity, but since I've decided to move away from basketball entirely, I won't be developing this further.
- Square font with images of nature in it. Mountains, sun, trees, beaches, flowers etc.
- Waves within the lettering. 
- Waves as the lettering.
-The final one chosen to be developed further.
