Tattoo Illusion

The third project of our Design class was to create a tattoo and then using photoshop take the tattoo and impose it onto a picture of ourselves making it look realistic using multiple tools. We used tools such as burn to darken the tattoo to match the shadows of our bodies and dodge to lighten it on light parts. Blur is used to blur the tattoo to help it blend with the body since the picture of the tattoo is sharper than the larger body image. Multiply would get rid of any of the white from the tattoo image left over from the original image since it was from the start on a piece of white paper. Finally warp was one of the most important tools, it allowed us to bend the tattoo image to fit the shape and contours of the body as a real tattoo would act. The end product would be the two images appearing together as one and the picture of us looking like we had a tattoo. In my own tattoo I utilized these tools to help blend the tattoo achieving the project goal.  

Other than the use of new tools and incorporating non digital resources the project was similar enough to the others we have done. My work had some stronger aspects such as the original drawing that became the tattoo, it had a good flow that fit the area of my body I put it on (my side). One of the weakest parts of the work would definitely be how the original image was maybe too grainy which forced the tattoo to be blurred. It ultimately made the image look like a mediocre picture of a real tattoo which could be improved by a picture retake and a refitting of the tattoo.

The project had its own easier and harder parts like most others. I personally found the drawing of the original tattoo picture easy abet still tedious. To me drawing was never too hard yet at the same time I was never very skilled, the tediousness came in with text seen in the image, it involved stylized text that required a large time investment to get right. The harder part of the project was definitely playing with the image playing with multiply and the magic wand to get it to select the whites I wanted to delete. The paper I was using was off-white and it sometimes failed to select it while sometimes it selected blending on the handle for deletion. In the end some of the handle blending had to be deleted to get rid of all the white.

I liked the project well enough and hold regrets as well as content for its aspects. If I had to change anything it would be the original body image. At the time I was not in the clear of how it should have been taken for the best results and it ended up being grainy. The grainy image force the tattoo to be a little grainy and detracted from the whole work.         

The selfie Project

Our second project this year in Elements of Design was to create an image in photoshop using a mish-mash of other images we found on the internet that represents us. In creating the image we were tasked to use a couple new photoshop tools that helped us alter the images we found to fit our own uses and look good together, along with this we still had to follow some of the four design elements we used in the first project. The new tools were using filters on images to change their look, using the layer makes to change how they look on top of each other, and blend modes that makes the images used seem to be continuous. Other than this the basic art elements such as contrast or proper alignment, in my image proper alignment was achieved through avoiding the middle of the image and having focal points on its fringes which the film strip helped in. Contrast in the picture was seen in multiple areas such as the night sky verses the computer board on opposite ends of the picture or Hobbs being bright colors on the dark background of the night sky.

My project has its own ups and downs having areas I like and areas or aspects I dislike. The works strongest aspect I think is how it is split into two areas of ⅓ and ⅔ creating an appealing proper alignment. On the opposite end of the spectrum is how I think the figurines on the filmstrip itself turned out, they don’t look like like they belong on the background and don't blend very well. This may be fixed by moving them somewhere else, changing the film color, or maybe playing heavily with filters.

There were some hard parts of the project as well as some easy ones. The easiest part was definitely setting up the background that only took a couple swipes of the erase tool and simple filters after the images were selected. The images on top of the background such as getting the space man right took a lot of work and sweat. From cropping him off of a similar background that messed with the magic wand tool to getting the the filters to not destroy parts of the image which made me hand color some parts differently, in all that part was a pain but turned out well.

What I would change if I had to do this project again is how I used the blend and layer mask tool. I did not use them liberally enough which resulted in some unneeded rough edges that pulled the work down and also made the overall lighting weird. Otherwise I am happy with the result and would not change too much.