Image Editing

An alternate cover for the book "The Sun Does Shine" showing a sunrise, a young black man surrounded by cones painted to look like KKK hats, and a black fist in the air. Subtitled "How I Found Life, Freedom, and Justice" and authored by Anthony Ray Hinton.

Bitmap Images

I read this book in 2020.  One of my colleagues at Santa Fe College is using the book for one of her reading classes.  It is a beautiful story about an Alabama man (Anthony Ray Hinton) who spent 30 years on death row for crimes he did not commit.  For anyone who has seen the 2019 movie "Just Mercy,"the lawyer featured there, Bryan Stevenson, is the same lawyer who was able to help Hinton finally regain his freedom.  Hinton is also represented in the movie, though only as a side character.  Although the book discusses horrific racist injustices, the beauty of it is in Hinton and his supporters' loving spirits and ability to persevere.  I was very touched by the book and this cover is my homage.


This was my first experience using Gimp.  I found the three images using Flickr and used five different layers (including the text) for the montage.  For the sunrise image and the image of the black man surrounded by KKK cones, I left the images as-is, adjusting only the opacity.  The image of the black fist, however, is clipped from a larger image.  For the text, I experimented with several different fonts and colors to try and get the feel I was looking for.


A proposed logo for the LLC "Concrete Dreamers" featuring two roses sprouting up from the sidewalk.

Vector Images

My partner and her sister started a consultancy called Concrete Dreamers, LLC that does program consulting and curriculum development.  The name of their organization was inspired by the Tupac Shakur poem "The Rose That Grew From Concrete."


This was also my first time using Inkscape.  I basically spent a few hours just playing around with the different tools, seeing what they could do.  The sidewalk was created using the rectangle tool plus some fill and stroke options.  The roses were created using the ellipses tool, and the stems using the calligraphy tool.  The "a" in Dreamers was created using the spirals tool.  Of course, I had to group and ungroup as well as raise and lower objects and modify opacity.  I also experimented with different fonts, adjusting sizes, colors, alignment, and letter spacing.


An infographic I created using Adobe Spark that describes the different learning theories.  And here is a short essay I wrote where I discuss these theories as practiced in two different Adult Education settings.

Created with Canva.

Header photo by Liubov Ilchuk on Unsplash