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.