Memento Mori

Progress report!!  Making transparencies of things is fun, but it's getting tedious!  I'm not very good at photography, so just getting images for this has been quite the trial.

Finished importing images to the project. Pathing selections and making transparencies to paste in took absolutely forever, but it's done!  Ended up removing the coffee stain texture because it looked really sloppy and the picture was already pretty busy.

Speaking of busy... I was initially worried about how cluttered the image is, and spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to alleviate the clutter... however, I've realized that it's a pretty fair representation of who I am at this point in time.  I am extremely cluttered and overwhelmed lately, so it kind of gets reflected in my self-analysis.  Anyways.  At some point along the way I managed to lose my editing on the coloration, so the whole thing got eye-blindingly bright again...

05/09 - So I've gone and fixed the coloration so the image is less blinding. Smoothed the buttons, fiddled a bit with some of the opacities. Think I'm done!

Stroke

Palette project: Learning to adjust dry/wet settings, experimenting with different brushes, etc.  FINALLY PAINTING!!!  YAY!!

So this was a really fun project... ended up settling on a very short stroke style.  The example dealt with much longer, smoother strokes... but I got uncomfortable trying to get long, smooth strokes with a mouse.  Ended up going with something influenced by impressionism--lots of shorter strokes, especially on the trees.  Once that feel together, it got easier and more fun. 

Stylize

source

So I was discussing my project with my professor, and she suggested that I take a look at Milton Glaser's Bob Dylan for further inspiration on more abstract, stylized hair for my portrait.  After some thought, I ended up deciding to redo things a bit and get more detailed.  I'm much happier with the result.

04/15 class - Colouring the hair in more detail will be the next step! 

04/15 evening - Colouuuuuuurs. 

04/17 class - Imported the portrait onto the final image... starting to work in other images.  Thus far I've been placing images as hard light layers for the most part.  Some have been grayscaled in order to keep a red/orange colour uniformity.  I'm a bit torn between making them easier to see and leaving them as is.  The image is a bit busy as is, which is concerning, and making the individual images easier to see will make it even busier.  On the other hand, I'm a little worried that I've got too much focus on my portrait--it's hard not to be biased in favour of it, since I spent so much time on it... I don't know, we'll see.

04/17 class - Oh, yeah, there's also a texture on this.  Coffee stained paper, but I'm not sure whether or not I want to keep it.  I may test some other textures later.  Added colour-coded buttons, debating whether to add text labels to them.  Depends on how abstract this is going to be overall, I guess.  This is kind of getting out of hand.

Victories thus far: 

• Colours are no longer blinding, which is a problem I had before.  
• Hair is a bit more stylized, which I like.

Worries:

• Too much colour?  Too busy?  I'm worried it's just getting overdone and overcrowded. 
• Portrait overly dominant?  I like it better this way, but I'm not sure this places much of an emphasis on this as a Photoshop project specifically...

Kaleidoscope

In-class practice with adjustments.  Worked primarily with Hue-Saturation, Colour Balance, Duotones/Tritones, and Curves.  

My goal here was largely to defamiliarize the image to some degree.  It's still obviously a bunch of flowers, but the original image...

... featured a single blooming flower with several dead ones underneath.  I did my best to saturate and modify the colours such that the wilted flowers ended up looking more like exotic, alien floral forms instead.  Probably poisonous, given the bright colours!  Touch at your own risk!

Breathing

I have begun work on my mind map!  Rough hair test, colours, etc.  Overlayed the original photo to make it a bit brighter and bolder.  I'm quite pleased with the result.  

Note to self: Photoshop doesn't like SAI files, and the Photoshop file is too big for SAI to handle.  Lots of saving images and importing them back and forth.  Painting happens in SAI, images are saved, are imported to Photoshop and edited there.

 

Further progress!  Background has been painted, lots of flowy rainbow lines.  I may end up repainting the self portrait.  We'll see.  Someday I'll get around to my facial features and the rest of the photoshopping.

Application

Just a couple of pieces I did on the side.  My roommate got an assignment to put together an advertisement image for a business class, but it was kind of not useful for her and she doesn't know how to work with Photoshop or anything of the sort.  Walked her through doing these simple effects in PS and had a good time!

Stock images by:

• Rawrdis
• LucieG-Stock
• NikxStock
• somadjinn
• moonberry
• Eirian-stock
• elanordh-stock
• EastAndTheBird

Unpolished

Categories:

• Art
• Dreams
• People
• Gaming
• School
• God
• Race
• Anxiety
• Literature
• Writing

Concept:

The idea here is to take an image of my Wacom tablet and fill the "screen" with a collage that represents me.  The tablet has eight smaller buttons and a larger pair of concentric circular buttons, giving me nine or ten categories, which is perfect.  The categories will be divided by colour in an organic fashion, with relevant images collaged within their respective categories.  On top of the collaged categories will be a self-portrait, because I don't like photographing my own face. XD  The main part of the head will be opaque, but the hair should fade out/blend into the collage towards the ends. 

Draft:

Very rough concept work, just blocking in possible section layout and such.  I can't do a lot until I get photos taken, which will take some time outside class.  This is just a horrible, horrible draft thrown together with non-stock images for lack of resources in class at the moment.  Will be replaced when I get something legitimate together.

Here we go. An actual, unedited photo of my lovely tablet. <3