IMAGE PROJECT

FINAL IMAGE

What a process. I had never used Photoshop before this assignment, and it was a right struggle. In our first class, I thought I may have been slightly getting the hang of it, because I was able to draw pain strokes on the images I had uploaded. Trying to emulate Richard Hamilton's collaged face was another story. Now Hamilton's final product is obviously far superior to my own creation, but I feel that, considering I'm an absolute beginner, I didn't do too bad! Granted, I had a lot of help.

Richard Hamilton's original.

THE PROCESS

I decided that I wanted to take the idea of collage and run with it a little bit. Round it out into more of a social comment if possible. I chose images of public figures, old and new, who are considered to be good looking and spliced them all together, to create the ultimate creature of beauty. Supposedly, anyway.

The gif above shows the images of each figure that I drew from, and exactly which parts of their physicality I extracted. I tried to go for the most recognisable parts of each (though, honestly, Bieber was a bit of whim). This was done almost solely using the Lasso tool, and copying each selection and pasting it onto a layer of my first image of Angelina Jolie.

The idea to dye Farrah Fawcett's hair red for the final product was more a result of playing around with colour than anything else. When I was working on a white background, the outline of the hair was tinged with the blue from Fawcett's original image, and rather than try to individually erase each pixel of colour that I didn't want, I just completely changed the saturation. Given that red hair is huge right now, I could say that I'm trying to make some sort of comment about societal trends and work it into the psychology of colour, but honestly I just thought it looked cool! I added a blue background because the white just seemed a bit uninteresting. Hamilton has splashes of blue in his original so I thought that might be a good colour to draw on.
I decided to show the process using gifs firstly because I felt like the image itself is not particularly exciting, and that just placing numerous screenshots of the creation of this not-particularly-exciting image would be extra unexciting. Secondly, one of the choices for emulation involved a gif from Japanese Roll Artists, and while this is not exactly the same, I thought it might be cool to work the concept of moving image and collage into the one project. I took a screenshot of each part of the process and created a gif out of them using http://gifmaker.me. Simple and effective!

And that is how this image was created using Photoshop. It wasn't easy, but it was actually pretty fun, in the end.





Romany