Digital Media Foundations, Type Assignment

Hello friends,
this year I am taking courses for my Emerging Arts and Digital Media minor. For the next eight months I will be posting assignments on my blog. Most of them will be samples of the coursework covered that week, including brief reflective writings.
This first assignment was to experiment with type, or with a single letter and case. As you can see, I got a little creative. :)
Here are my five samples:

   2. What attracted you to one of the letters you chose? What things did you notice about the letter as a shape?
When choosing letters, what attracted me was the variation of fonts, not the individual letters. I picked the ones that I thought would give me the most flexibility, like bricks to build a church with. As you can see, several of my samples has subjects that have very definite characteristics. For example, the owl made out of O's. I couldn't have made the owl as easily if I had used an H. :)
3. Did you find working with layers easy and intuitive, or awkward at first? Where there any tricks that made working with layers easier?
At first I was pretty confused. I hadn't used photo shop in five or so years! After lots of mistakes and UGLY results, I discovered two tricks. The first trick is to make a layer for every single part of your canvas. For example, I made a layer for every row and every larger piece of the font so that they could be adjusted individually. The other trick I used, which helped me in adjusting and giving personality to my type, is the COMMAND T, or the FREE TRANSFORM action. This allowed me to manipulate my characters in a new and really exciting way! Check out my giant, tipsy T! The one that appears to be falling over. Also, when I did that piece, I was experimenting with kinetic motion, or implied motion.
 4. Were letters always the figures in your compositions, or were there some compositions where they seemed to form the ground for other parts of the composition?
Yes! I referred to this in my first response question as well. But in three of my five samples I created other shapes, using the letters as foundations. In one of them I used a lower case 'i' to create a lego-style samurai warrior! In another I used cursive O's to create an owl. And in the other I used lower case cursive f's to create my version of a kaleidoscope vortex, which reminded me of a dust devil.