Digital Imaging

The Wilco song, “California Stars” served as the inspiration for my final project. The song is a recent favorite of mine and I knew that I wanted to find a way to somehow represent the lyrics visually. The lyrics are included at the end of this project statement.

The part of the song that I focused on is as follows: “I’d like to rest my heavy head tonight on a bed of California stars, I’d like to lay my weary bones tonight on a bed of California stars”. The song makes me think of the time that I spent in Los Angeles last spring, working in Hollywood.

The scene that the song brings to my mind is an open field with a beautiful starry night sky; very peaceful and very beautiful. I wanted to tie in my association with California and the time I spent there so I tied in some iconic images from Hollywood. I first found an image of a field and some mountains from Northern California. Next, I painted the night sky and drew in the Hollywood “Walk of Fame” as a path leading to the mountains, where the Hollywood sign is displayed.

Here is a link to the lyrics in full: http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/wilco/californiastars.html

and the song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQwlAjiSzQc&feature=related

…just to give you the feel of what I was working with in terms of inspiration.

Here is my final image: It appears to be very dark, however, I had to print several times because the printer was printing lighter and greener for some reason. This is the color format that worked to print and I am very happy with this final printed image.

Here is the image before I made a lot of progress:

Here is the image I used for the stars (it took a lot of manipulating) :

Here is the original scene: I had to create a night time scene so I played a lot with the contrast, saturation and levels. The stars were painted based on a tutorial that I found.

I love the composition of my final image because it really speaks to the tone of the song. Wilco is a rock band with a folky feel at times, so I felt like the song could be portrayed as a sort of memory hanging on a wall. I think the rustic brick speaks to the folk genre as does the antique frame

For my final project I did a matte painting for Merlin, a show on the BBC Channel- the special effects are not remarkable and many of the scenes are especially cliché. (I HIGHLY recommend this show *wink* ) I think the budget for the show is not very large so they skimp on the special effects. Anyways there are many epic sorcerer battles, with cliché backgrounds such as cemeteries, stone mazes, ominous clouds, magic storms, magical shrubberies, etc..

So I wanted to create an overly cliché setting for a sorcerer battle.

I was rather  inspired by this image-

The battle would take place on a knoll

I took out the trees and originally created a haunted forest tree brush- but the haunted forest detracted from the overall image- it was too much. This little hill would overlook a valley, aka an edited yosemite. There are so many good, quality, large images of yosemite. Like this one-  but from a different angle

I took out halfdome so it would less recognizable. This was about halfway through editing process…

The clouds were taken from about 6 different stock images, I used the clone brush, the eraser, and different layer blending modes.

The tree was taken froma picture of washington dc after a snowstorm…

originally the layer of back mountains had color and were “lit” until, I realized my light sources were conflicting. The back mountains were taken from about 10 or so other pictures. (originally they were much more detailed)

I combined all these… and

but it still felt undone so I added a color layer of light blue- it could have been any light color- purple might have been nice too.

and voilà it looks finished

!

So I had difficulty with this assignment- it kept changing. There were too many things going on at once.

Thus, I revamped my poster. The background I drew by hand. I basically copied some of my notes, using a tablet. And got a

basic image for the background.

next important part: the font

My previous font was very difficult too read, and not very movie poster-ish at all. After contemplating the theme of my movie- I went back to the superhero font idea

which I did in illustrator.

The final product- voilà!

Wow my final project was so challenging! I ended up with multiple photoshop files (because I’m reluctant to merge layers) and I think I ended up with…over a hundred layers. Huge files. I can’t even transfer over the original photoshop file to the dropbox because it’s too large for all my flash drives and duke webfiles.

Here’s the synopsis I typed up for my illustration:

Aelin (also known as Celaena) is the main character in Queen of Glass, a retelling of Cinderella I read on fictionpress.com. It is a story full of action, adventure, fantasy, and romance. The synopsis: “an infamous young assassin who is more than she seems must battle her way to freedom in a corrupt kingdom where magic has been outlawed.” The author, S.J. Maas, became so popular through fictionpress.com, that she decided to get it published.

In the story, Aelin has Ashryver eyes, meaning turquoise with a ring of gold around the pupil (a sign of her queenly heritage). She is incredibly good at fighting in battle and often comes off as having a hard exterior (but really, she’s a softy inside). I tried to capture her pre-battle emotions in this illustration. Intense eyes, flowing mane of hair, sword at the ready…she’s ready to kick some bad guy butt.

—-

Here are the reference images I worked with:

this is the author of Queen of Glass (she said in one interview that she based Aelin off of herself..she admits it was kind of narcissistic but Aelin is a bit narcissistic anyway so it’s quite fitting)

this is from an eye tutorial from one of my favorite digital painters http://www.furiae.com/index.php?view=gallery

this was my reference for the pose, but I altered it a bit (which turned out to be hard because I had no model to look at really except myself..)

here’s an in-process version:

Here is my final version:

For the font I wanted something reminiscent of the Golden Compass font, and I found this pirate-ish font that I thought was kind of fitting because she’s an assassin. In retrospect I think I made her hair too huge…it’s like a gigantic lion’s mane! It’s hard to say which part took the longest, because, honestly, every single part took the longest. I used a ton of the photoshop features, like the Gaussian blur (for the skin), the vector feature (for the sword), the effects feature (for the text), and other stuff I can’t think of right now. I really learned a lot (mostly through my messing up, which is why I have so many layers because I kept all my mess ups too)…I’m pretty sure I’ll try another digital painting sometime soon this is probably one of those things where you can only get better through practice. lots of practice.

Exodus 14 (New International Version)

21 Then Moses stretched out his hand over the sea, and all that night the LORD drove the sea back with a strong east wind and turned it into dry land. The waters were divided, 22 and the Israelites went through the sea on dry ground, with a wall of water on their right and on their left.

23 The Egyptians pursued them, and all Pharaoh’s horses and chariots and horsemen followed them into the sea. 24 During the last watch of the night the LORD looked down from the pillar of fire and cloud at the Egyptian army and threw it into confusion. 25 He made the wheels of their chariots come off ^[b^] so that they had difficulty driving. And the Egyptians said, “Let’s get away from the Israelites! The LORD is fighting for them against Egypt.”

26 Then the LORD said to Moses, “Stretch out your hand over the sea so that the waters may flow back over the Egyptians and their chariots and horsemen.” 27 Moses stretched out his hand over the sea, and at daybreak the sea went back to its place. The Egyptians were fleeing toward ^[c^] it, and the LORD swept them into the sea. 28 The water flowed back and covered the chariots and horsemen—the entire army of Pharaoh that had followed the Israelites into the sea. Not one of them survived.

29 But the Israelites went through the sea on dry ground, with a wall of water on their right and on their left. 30 That day the LORD saved Israel from the hands of the Egyptians, and Israel saw the Egyptians lying dead on the shore. 31 And when the Israelites saw the great power the LORD displayed against the Egyptians, the people feared the LORD and put their trust in him and in Moses his servant.

My final project is about Moses and God rescuing the Israelites out of Egypt. The scene that captures this moment is the famous parting of the seas when God parts the seas to allow the Israelites to walk across the ocean to safety and Pharaoh and his army chase after them only to drown. It truly must have been a sight to behold as the gigantic ocean was lifted up to show the ground underneath. In film depictions of it, the waves tower over the humans and it is an illustration of God’s mighty power.

There is also a pillar of fire/smoke that God uses to both guide and protect the Israelites.

It was a bit challenging to find images that were high enough resolution to fit the picture, which is rather big. But I stuck with the given image size because I thought having a really high quality huge image would help portray the power of the scene.

The waves were challenging as well, but finding many kind of waves and blending them together made it work out OK. I wanted to have huge towering waves but could not find a way to do that with the images I found. Instead I got a bit of a shallow ocean, but hopefully it gets the point across.

Stock photos:

NOTE: I don’t see a category for the final project, so I left it uncategorized. And the computers at Smith Warehouse can’t seem to access the Zappa commons folder anymore, so I’m not sure how to submit the final version.

So this is my final version of my portrait of Artemis. I ended up using a lot of the original elements that I wanted (like the deer, moon, lake, Natalia Vodianova, etc.) and I think I was able to achieve a pretty cohesive, coherent image. In the beginning I had envisioned something a lot darker, but the end image is a lot more placid (which I’m okay with). Here are some of the actual components of the project:

The original lake, a photograph by Ansel Adams. I cloned it and made it double as wide, and adjusted some of the mountains using random brushes to make it less of a mirror image.

I used the foreground grass in my final image.

The bottom sky.

I am almost finished with my final draft of my project. I did my illustration of King Midas with the help of textures (from cgtextures.com where I also got my water texture in OO7 movie poster) and paintbrushes that I downloaded. I made the contextual scene of the King Midas character to be of the Pactolus River where Midas washed his powers away into the river. I wanted to achieve this effect that Midas releases his golden touch into the water of the river.

First, I made used the textures of a slightly lit sky and a reflective water surface for the setting. I used the transform option of skew to add perspective. I played around with a camera and a toga made from my bedsheets in order to find a good pose to put in my illustration (I found that self-posing was better than images from the internet because I could get exactly what I wanted). I used the pose of an outstretched hand while the other hand is holding something. I desaturated to everything to about -80 (which is almost completely) because I wanted to have the gold effect stand out. I used the gold textures that I made from the tutorial to display the color of objects, water, “golden touch” emanating from my hand and gold on the toga dissipating.  I used blending option of “overlay” and clipping mask for these layers and textures. I then partially erased the “golden” layers to reveal the original layers under it. I used paintbrushes I downloaded to add water splashes in order to make it appear that the body is in the water.  As for the saturation and lighting of the body, I wanted to portray King Midas in the same light and colors as displayed in the movie, “300″. I think I still have to touch up and clean up some edges and effects but this is the overall layout. I might also include something else besides the sky in the back such as pillars or something. I tried to find pillar images I could use or a wreath (to denote royalty) on the internet but I couldn’t find ones that could work.

I plan to base my illustration on King Midas.  In the image, I might include the following themes: highlighted gold imagery, while rest of illustration is desaturated, Modern or greek mythology (pillars or cityscape in background) and Royal imagery: throne, crown, etc., or mythical images. I wanted to either recreate the scene when King Midas turns his Midas’s daughter turned into solid gold (partially or wholly gold, face partially gold or flowing gold hair) or King Midas with a golden apple or in the Pactolus River which would be symbolized by water turning into gold. I also wanted to show Midas reaching his hand towards the audience with his gold power emanating from his hand.  Photoshop effects I wanted to achieve were: selective desaturation (make gold stand out), “Golden touch” effect and “Medusa” effect (Statue).

I was able to follow some of the photoshop tutorials listed below and made some objects turn to gold.

Before:

After:

I was able to turn objects successfully into gold but not faces. I don’t know yet whether I could create the scene of Midas daughter turning into gold.

“Touch of Gold Effect” http://mintyferret.com/photoshop-tutorials/turn-objects-into-gold/

http://mintyferret.com/photoshop-tutorials/turn-objects-into-gold/2/

“Convert a Human to a Statue Effect in Photoshop” http://www.visualprogression.com/video/video/show?id=1976985:Video:8727

“Medusa Effect” http://www.psdrockstar.com/photo-effects/human-statue-effect/

For my final project I wanted to do a lighthouse scene.

Here is my initial sketch:

With paint:

And here is my first draft:

I decided I wanted a more gloomy environment so I’m just focusing on the lighthouse in a stormy setting.  The waves suck because I couldn’t find any waves big enough to use.  Also the ocean looks a little warped.

I made my picture smaller and found some waves so the waves look a little better.  I also decided it looked too empty so I added the perspective of a boat sailing towards land.  The boat needs a little ( a lot) work.

Put in some more work in.  Still looking for a better boat picture

So this is the poster I presented in class. I’m going to toy with the actor’s anes a bit and see how I end up liking it.

One Piece is a popular manga (cartoon book) in Japan. It’s a series spanning many years, with dozens of volumes. Every once in a while they come out with a movie version of the series, and their posters look something like this:

As you can see they look slightly different from the usual movie posters. They don’t have the usual text and don’t list the movie company.

I wanted to create something that showed the recent happenings in the manga, and also illustrate the visuals from the manga and maybe emphasize the cartoon book paper feel and texture.

This is the grid system I worked with. It is divided into thirds, and then the top and bottom are divided into eighths.

Then I resized the image to consider the edges for printing, and this is the final product: