Blog Entry #3: Final Project Bid Idea Artists

While completing my midterm project, a different big idea began to develop in my mind as I was trying to show our fantasy/reality idea. I realized that I like to examine how different artists create people in their works of art. I found an artist that takes a very dark look in how they create their characters. This artist is Alexander Casteels and the image to the right is one of his and it can be found here. I really like the darkness of this artist. He takes things such as fairytale characters and uses literal darkness as well as dark ideals to show a kind of irony of how real life isn't like fairytales. Another one of his works is shown below and can be found here.

His big ideas have to do with emotional darkness such as sorrow, pain, & evil and dreamlike images. I think it's inspiring in how this artist takes fantastic things like the fairytales I mentioned earlier and brings them down to earth. It makes me want to know more about this artists life. His artwork would make me think initially that he's had a hard life and has been surrounded by a lot of optimistic people that he's wanted to share his life with through his artwork. I will use aspects of my life to inspire my final project similar to how this artist has had his life affect his artwork. I will also try to add some darkness to my images. I don't want to add nearly as much as this artist did, but I think darkness helps to bring deep thoughts out of the image.

The second artist is Carlos Ortega Elizalde and his images are more three dimensional. The image to the right specifically drew my attention since it goes along with our midterm bid idea of real/fantasy very well and can be found here. I really like how these images are three dimensional since it gives them more of a real aspect. This artist seems to have big ideas of fantasy and a simple kind of happiness. Many of his images are of strange creatures or robots that are happily smiling. Another image that I liked of his is shown below and can be found here.

I think this artwork is inspiring due to its bright colors and textures. It must take the artist a long time to create the surfaces required to make this art three dimensional. Although many of this artist's images have a simple happiness to them, some of them seem very extraterrestrial and real. There is a serious aspect to these alien creatures that diverges from the fantasy of his other images. I wonder how this artist is able to put himself in these two different mindsets so he can create both types of images. I will use this inspiration to try to make my images more three dimensional both literally and give them more dimensional meaning by trying to put myself in multiple mindsets. I used some techniques in my midterm project to make my artwork three dimensional, but if I can I'd like to use even more in my final project so that my artwork looks similar to this artist's.

Blog Entry #2: Photoshop Bubble Tutorial

I used a tutorial that explained how to take a stock image of a straw berry and a stock image of a bubble and make the berry appear to be a bubble shown here. I used the cherry image shown below & to the left.  I also used the bubble image shown below & to the right.  The tutorial suggested that the fruit image's background be fairly simple.  This is because later in the tutorial you have to remove the fruit completely while retaining the shadows from the background.  I also chose a bubble with a simple background as it was easy to use the magic wand and quick selection tool to remove the bubble from it's background image.

The image to the right shows me lowering the transparency of the bubble and placing it over the cherry.  The lowered transparency helped me see how much I need to liquefy the bubble to completely match the cherry.  I have adjusted the size using scaling transformations as well so that less liquefying will be necessary in the next stage.

To the left shows an image of me in the process of liquefying the bubble around the cherry.  This process is almost completed but a few edges still need to be touched up so that the bubble fits the cherry exactly. The bubble gets desaturated to pure black & white after this as well as being duplicated a few times and getting its transparency adjusted.  The cherry is then extracted from the image & desaturated and set to overlay.


The image to the right shows the next step in the process.  The cherry must be removed from the background layer so that the we can see the background through the bubble cherry.  I used the clone stamp in order to clone the shadow of the cherry.  This was fairly difficult since the shadow is a gradient so I used a softer brush with a lower transparency.  I also used the dust & scratches filter in order to airbrush the shadow since I had imperfect stamping.

Since the cherry now shows the background behind it, it must also show the small bit of stem that is covered by the front surface of the cherry.  It must also show a reflection of the stem on top of the cherry.  I copied the lower part of the stem and placed it below the bottom of the stem slightly to show the small bit of stem that's covered.  Then I copied the entire stem and mirrored it 180.  I had to rotate it slightly more to get the right angle of the reflection.  I also lowered the transparency so that it would look reflective and not solid.

Next I added the reflection of a different bubble.  I had to remove this bubble from it's black background first but this was very easy to do by selecting the color range of black and then unselecting the parts inside the bubble.

The same process as before is used to mold this bubble onto the surface of the cherry.  This time though the bubble transparency must be lowered a lot since the reflection in the image comes from trees and a building.  These things aren't present in the background of our image, but this reflection will do just fine at a lowered transparency.

The final step is lightening the cherry with respect to the background.  This is accomplished by adding a brightness of -40 to the entire image.  Then you simply select the mask layer and erase parts that lay over the bubble & stem.  This makes the background just slightly less bright than the fruit in the image.

The final image is shown below.