Advanced Photoshop Final - Jellicle Cats Diptychs

The source graphics for each side of this diptych are as follows:
                                     On the left - Bryce                                                On the right - Lion
                                                         Grass                                                                     Grass
                                                         Blue Dragonfly                                                       Orange and Blue Dragonfly
                                   Background - Grass                                                                     Spider
To make the wings of the dragonflies semi-transparent I masked the entire dragonfly and then went back over the mask on the wings with the paintbrush tool on black but set to a very low opacity.

I have always likes T.S. Eliot's Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats and this quote from the poem "The Naming of Cats" seemed to fit these two images of my cats Bryce and Tuck.

I have always enjoyed these two images of Pandy as she comes up with an ingenious solution to get the last of the milk out of the glass and I felt that they made a good diyptych.  I did have to do some serious color adjustments to these photos as the photos I scanned were faded.  I also had to make some additional adjustments to make the colors of the right side match more closely the colors on the left side, though the left side still has bluer shades than the right side.

And just for fun here is a triptych of a chipmunk gathering peanuts from this mug on my last camping trip.

Advanced Photoshop HW #13

 This assignment was working with translucent objects and I had the idea of distilling a rainbow.

Working with more translucent objects the goal was to create an inspirational scene emerging from a light bulb. I added the lightning bolt in the foreground of the image, but the bolt in the background is all mother nature.

The references for both of the above images can be found here.

Advanced Photoshop HW #12

I made this Acoma pot by creating a pen shape of a cross section of the shape I wanted for the pot and then bending the extrusion 360°.  I then applied the balsa wood texture to the side material.  After applying the repoussé I used the 3D tools to edit the texture to change the color and add the pattern.

 

 

An Isoline drawing

Advanced Photoshop HW #11 - HDR and HDR Toning

 Using the HDR method really boosted the amount of detail on this bleeding heart blossom.  I was able to bring out the fine detail of the texture of blossom.

 I love the amount of detail, the textures that I can reveal that were lost in the individual images.

 This above image is playing with the surrealistic effects that can be applied to the image.
The image to the right is mid exposure original image for the two previous images.

The image I took years ago (as shown on the right) using the faux HDR Toning adjustment to create the HDR style image above.

Advanced Illustrator HW #10 - My Dinner with...

References

Terry Pratchett is one of my favorite authors and his Discworld series is absolutely fantastic.  The setting and other elements for this composition comes straight from his books, from the half-timber buildings and Librarian turned ape to the foods on the menu and the pet swamp dragon Errol.  I even created the type for the "My dinner with..." text (with the pen tool) to be reminiscent of the type used on the covers of many of Terry's books.
I was initially going to set the background to an interior bar-room scene and then I found images of these amazing half-timber models which suited the image in my head.  The hardest part of this composition was manipulating the cobbled street to match the half-timber models in the background.  I did this by starting with a repeatable cobble pattern that I used along the bottom of the image, which I then used the puppet warp tool to warp the cobbles to follow the line of the buildings.

Advanced Photoshop HW #9

I used the luminance blending tool to add a layer of clouds from a different image (below) in front of this image I took of Mount Hood.

Using the actions tool helps me to automate certain aspects such as resizing, watermarking and renaming of images.  A process that used to take me hours now can be done in a lot less time and can be done with limited user input.  Larger batches can be done in the background while I work on other projects.  However there are still aspects of the image manipulation process that still requires individual attention particularly the basic photo manipulations, such as levels, which I do for almost all of my photographs.

I used the batch method to apply the re-size  action for this and a few other images and used the droplet tool to apply the watermark.

Advanced Photoshop Midterm - Graffiti SelfPotrait

Backgound image: cave

I am not fond of graffiti art in general so I tied to find a style that suited me, which I found in the form of a tribal/tattoo brush pack that I downloaded from Brusheezy.  I also prefer natural settings, which is why I chose to decorate this cave wall.  I heavily used the perspective transform tool  to get the patterns to follow the contours of the walls and I used a variety of blend modes to insure the texture of the wall remained visible.  I used masks to "erase" where bits of wall had fallen, where some of the patterns overlay each other and to change the color of the moon in the sun and moon pattern.

I looked at many of the "graffiti" fonts at dafont but none suited me, so I looked for "tribal" fonts instead and found this font (tribal 2) which suited my personal style.  For the name mark I used the pen tool heavily to alter the letterforms as you can see in the comparison with the original letterforms.  I wanted to make the letters distinct enough to be recognizable with minimal overlap, which made the "o" the hardest of the letters to alter.

Advanced Photoshop HW #6

Working with line and with the pen tool.

Advanced Photoshop HW #5

 These are experimenting with the mixer brush and painting tools.

Advanced Photoshop HW #4

This is a series of postcards again influenced by Terry Pratchett.

References