Monday, April 25, 2011

Photoshop Homework #11 - Using Paint Tools

 Using various brushes and utilizing the mixer brush tool I transformed the wild rose picture (right) into the painting (above).


Thursday, April 7, 2011

Tuesday, April 5, 2011

Photoshop Midterm - "Leonardo's Dream"

Leonardo da Vinci has been a prominent figure in my life.  His ability to see correlations between seemingly unrelated things has always astounded me.  Some of the influence for choosing his obsession with flight comes from having watched "Leonardo's Dream Machines" which aired on PBS.  In this show two teams worked to build one of Leonardo's inventions.  One team decided to try to build one of his most famous inventions, his flying machine.  Using materials available during his time and only using elements that Leonardo himself designed, they were able to create a flying machine that actually worked.  This means that Leonardo could have flown almost 400 years before the Wright Brothers first flight.

For this project I wanted to show some of the awe that I felt when I watched Leonardo's flying machine fly for the first time.  All of the drawings and pages shown in this image come from the remaining pages of his works.  Most of the pages come from his "Codex on the Flight of Birds."  I wanted the image to have the feel of a cluttered desktop, asif Leonardo had just stepped away and would be back to continue working.  For the ink splotches I downloaded a brush set from www.brusheezy.com.

Here is a list of all the sources I used for the project:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1oxp5gu21TE-6enLhapJhf0eM8ht60T_A-RMumbX78bQ/edit?hl=en&authkey=CJqt8soC#

Photoshop Homework #6 - Working with Text "Quoth the Raven"

When we were told we could use quotes for this assignment the first thing I thought of was this raven photo I had taken a few years before and the words "quoth the raven" from Edgar Allan Poe's poem "The Raven."  So I reread the poem and when I came to the part that mentions the bust of Pallas I decided to add that element.  I also had a picture of the moon and a bare tree that helped to set the mood.  I downloaded a suitably eerie font from www.fontspace.com to use for the quote.  Due to the fact that both the bust and the raven images were taken during the day I used the burn tool to darken those elements.  The moon was also not in the proper place as the source of illumination so I moved it and made it a bit larger.

I got the image for the bust of Athena Pallas from http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ea/Bust_Athena_Velletri_Glyptothek_Munich_213.jpg

Photoshop Homework #4 - Working with Color "Nature's Bounty"

For this image I wanted to use a complimentary color scheme.  I used the Color Scheme Designer web site to determine which colors to use.  Each of the flowers are from my own photos of various flowers from the Sonoran and Mojave deserts.

Photoshop Homework #3 - Duotone "Desert Gunslinger"

For this image I was originally just going to add the hat to this Mojave green rattlesnake, but when I put the hat on the snake I thought it looked a lot like a cowboy so I decided to add a gunbelt.  The hard part came from trying to find an image of a gunbelt that would fit around the body of the snake.  However when I finally found one that would work it had no gun holstered.  To get around this I made a layer that had just the part that would cover the gun and placed it above the image of the gun I added.

The snake and the hat were my own images while the gunbelt I got from www.alfonsosgunleather.com/Pages/western.htm and the gun from www.military-quotes.com/forum/have-diease-need-help-t74850.html