Ocean pollution poster, Adobe Photoshop

Ocean pollution is a big issue that affects the whole world. The issue can be traced back to the Roman times where runoff from farms and other waste was disposed of in the ocean. Many common man-made pollutants reach the ocean, including: pesticides, sewage, plastic, oil, and other harmful substances. These pollutants are consumed by organisms in the ocean and are therefore introduced into the global food chain. Fertilizers used on farmland eventually make their way into streams, then rivers and eventually into oceans and they cause large algal blooms which deplete oxygen from the water and create dead zones where little or no marine life can exist. Trash in the oceans accumulate into trash patches or “islands” of because currents, one in the North Pacific is known as the Pacific Trash Vortex, and is estimated to be the size of Texas. There are now laws that forbid dumping harmful pollutants into the ocean, and ocean restoration efforts have met some success (nationalgeographic.com). It is estimated that over 100 million marine animals die because of plastic in the ocean each year (conserveturtles.org). I made my poster to bring awareness to all of the garbage in the ocean and the harm it does. There are many efforts to clean up the ocean, but we need to fix the problem at its source, and to do that we need to bring awareness to the issue and make people understand the consequences of their actions. My poster displays that in many water bodies, there is so much trash that you can not tell that there is even water underneath. I made the poster to try and show that the pollution in the ocean is awful, and no one would want to have to swim in it like we force sea creatures to do.

To make this poster, I used four images and a combination of fonts. I made a recycle sign out of a picture of the ocean, and got a picture of a bathtub and filled it with trash, this was by far the hardest part. I added image filters to the pictures to make them look more interesting, and I changed the hue to make it more vibrant. The tools that I used are: the magic wand tool, quick selection tool, move tool, paintbrush tool, spot healing brush, eraser tool, and eyedropper tool.

These are the photos that I used to create the poster.