This was a fun project. A four-parter: untouched photograph, retouched photograph, found object/ filter utilization, and abstract.

 

Some quick fixes to any portrait: brighten up the whites of the eyes and teeth, smooth the skin, eliminate extraneous hair, whether that is flyaways or stubble and use liquefy tool sparingly.

 

Filters can be your friend or your friend in appearance. Using too many of them produces interesting affects, but if for the wrong occasion, they can be overdone. (I like the Ocean Ripple filter myself, but when can we really use that to enhance the realism of something. I rarely Photoshop underwater scenes, but there will be a day… and I’ll be waiting.)

 

The found object portion of that photo was a great challenge. The goal was to find compositions that suggest the space you’re replacing. It’s a weird thing to forget (or at least to try to forget for a moment) what you are looking at and look at the shapes they make. I did that with my lunch and I think the other patrons of the sushi restaurant thought I had some sort of disorder where I had to rotate my plate a quarter clockwise five times before I could eat a bite and then I would have to rotate it again.

 

Abstract art is a whole other world for me. It was very interesting trying to do something where I wasn’t even inspired. I started out with circles for eyes. A bunch of them and added layer effects, bevel, inner glow, outer glow, satin and drop shadow. I initially had a stroke on there as well, but everyone in design knows if you can do without a stroke, do. Strokes are for kids that still can’t color in the lines. Not like me, an arteest, who colors outside the lines and makes les statements. Then I decided I liked that and added color bars with the same layer effects for hair, but down the road I realized I liked that look (it looked like the buildings of Wizard of Oz’s Emerald City– the faraway view) smooth and shiny like crystals. I wanted some painterly-ness to it, so I had a texture layer of brush strokes. I only brushed part of the art board and then copy-pasted until the whole thing was covered (the wonders of technology!). Then at some point I traced my eyes with the pen tool, brushed loosely my nose and mouth. It needed more, so I applied a technique I experimented with in the book cover project where I make a Mondrian-esque layer using the shift key, a round hard brush and the paint bucket for some of the spaces between the black abstract wacked grid I was making. Make that a blend mode (I love “vivid light” now) and you really have something to play with. I messed with the order of the layers, entertained by the various versions of my obscured face. I messed with the order of the layers like they were players on a baseball team and each player had a chance at bat. One of the layers made one of the eyes I took from the original look red and strange, so I kept that mode. And that’s kind of how abstracts are made. Things start to look weird and there becomes a point when you start to like it. It’s a great lesson for creation, because sometimes, you don’t feel like making the thing you must make. Sit down and do it anyway. There’s a moment in the process where the material speaks to you, where your mistakes become charming details and you see things that can be tweaked ever so slightly to create meaning. That’s the fun. When all of it falls into place as if it was magnetized and just needs a little jostling to create order.