In 2002, I decided to indulge myself and enrolled on an HNC Multimedia Design course at Selby College. It was a year long full time course, and despite being the only OAP amongst a group of 18 & 19 year olds, I found it to be a thoroughly enjoyable experience. The 1st assignment was to explore digital imaging, using a wide variety of software, and the exercise was to design a welcome slideshow which could be shown at a Music Technology Exhibition at the NEC. Music was to be included, but we did not have to create that, as it was not for real we could choose what we liked. The theme was "Velocity Sensitive"

I started by choosing Bat out of Hell , and a series of motor cycle and fire images. I thoroughly enjoyed myself, listening to wall to wall Meatloaf as I played with different images. Although I liked the images, it didn't really fulfil the brief, so I changed to a copyright free track which was bland, and a different style of image.

The images shown below are just some of the many that I created for the project, the earlier ones being from the Bat out of Hell stage, and the later ones are from those that I included in the final presentation.There are also a couple of images that I did using Adobe Illustrator, a programme that I'd not come across before, and haven't used since the course, I normally use Coreldraw for that kind of image. The Coreldraw suite is much cheaper than the Adobe software, but it is possible to do just about everything with Photopaint and Coreldraw that can be done with Illustrator and Photoshop, and there are plenty of other image editors that you might well have that can cover much of the same ground, though Adobe software is the industry standard, and does the lot, superbly well. Photoshop Elements is a cut down, much cheaper version of Photoshop, but is an excellent starting point for anyone wanting to try creating digital images for themselves.

I thoroughly enjoyed the assignment, and in the process was introduced to a wide variety of software, I worked on Macs, which was an experience in itself - I learned every way possible to crash a Mac in the 1st few weeks.

Robbie Beechey

This image was done mainly in Illustrator, and finished in Photoshop.		I think this image was done wholly in Illustrator. I was trying to create images to illustrate children's stories, similar to the Mr Men stories.

The 1st 9 images are from the Bat out of Hell stage. They were mainly created using lots of different layers and blending them in different ways. The hands were mine, scanned in, and the flames were created using a demo copy of Eye Candy from a magazine cover disc.

The next 4 images were based on this ball. I have no idea how I created it - I think I was trying out Photoshop filters and effects on the title "Velocity Sensitive", though it might well have been Corel Photopaint, and the ball appeared. I've never managed to reproduce it. I then used it to create a set of images.

The next 12 images are from the final set that I submitted. They were all shown on an image of a piece of music technology, and different sound terms were highlighted, shown greyed out or almost invisible throughout the slide show. In all there were around 50 images in the set.