Monday, May 16, 2011

"Fantastical" Self-Portrait

Photo Repair


The assignment for these pictures was to take the original, beat up and torn picture and to make is pretty much as good as new. This was an extremely long an tedious task, however, once a realized what I had to do, it became increasingly simple. In order to get rid of all the small folds, all I had to do was use the spot healing brush which was the most time consuming part because there are so many creases in the original. In order to get rid of the big crease down the middle and on the left side i used a combination of spot healing and the clone tool. The hardest part was getting rid of the tears where there was no picture left over. For this I used the clone tool again and remade the sections piece by piece. Because I had done so many individual parts, the new piece was a little bumpy so I smoothed over the background with the blur tool but tried not to make it blend in with the people in the foreground. 

Thursday, May 5, 2011

Surreal Design

The assignment for this piece was to create a surreal image. I focused on using mostly color to make it dream-like. The original image was just a blue sky with grey clouds so I used the lasso tool to outline the sky and I set the hue to -56 and the saturation to +34. I wanted to also create a flying animal that would never seem to fit in the desert in real life. I have always been fascinated by the poison dart frog and butterflies so I combined the two. The wings were from a pair of brown wings of which I only cropped out one. I copy-pasted it, overlapped them an adjusted the size. Afterwards I added a pattern to the layer and changed the scaling so that the wings were no longer brown. Because it was meant to be dream-like,  I did not line up the shadow with the shape of the frog and the wings. Lastly, I took one of my old pictures of a marble and placed it in the sky as if it was a distant, somewhat transparent moon or planet. THE END ^_^  .....(or is it?)

Tuesday, April 26, 2011

Storm Thorgerson

The assignment for this project was to create a poster in the style of a graphic designer. The poster had to include a background of an image we created ourselves as well as four of their own pieces. We had to include biographical information and and explanation of the style or a certain piece. Storm Thorgerson often uses different types of reflections as well as putting objects in a place you wouldn't expect them. He believes that the awkward appearance of an object highlights its beauty.

In several of his pieces, Storm Thorgerson places objects in desolate areas and because of this I chose to make the background set in the desert. For one of his single covers for The Mars Volta, Thorgerson had the reflection of a mannequin become that of a real man. Because he has a whimsical style, I decided to make my mannequin's reflection be that of a black and white cartoon.