- Final Project: Artist Statement -
Hi. I'm writing my artist statement on a separate page because I think I'll be writing a lot about my project, process, ideas, etc., and plus the artist statement alone is worth it's own page. Now, let's start at the very beginning!!
the beginning
You may be wondering how on Earth I got this idea. Well, let's take a quick trip to the past. From the start, I knew I wanted to do a movie poster. Not the traditional ones where it's a random scenery with characters plopped onto with a faint gradient, instead, I wanted to do a poster that looked like a scene from a movie. I went through many ideas and scrapped a bunch of them before coming up with my finished project. Initially, I wanted to do a Power Ranger inspired piece, but I decided not to because I wasn't really feeling the idea enough to go any further with it. Another idea I started but didn't finish was doing real-life depictions of mythological creatures such as the Qingniao, a three-legged messenger bird from Chinese mythology that served the Queen Mother of the West. What stopped me was that I thought I would be disrespecting their culture (and other cultures) by creating something based off a piece of their cultural identity I knew little of. With many Photoshop files being made and destroyed repeatedly, I soon found myself in an art block and masking random objects in hopes that I would come up the fabulous, A+ idea that I would actually finish. Soon enough, I finally came up with a great subject: a bullfrog. Why did I choose a bullfrog? Because of this video:
this video is funny ok i know it's kind of gross but it's nature so get over it LOL
plus pls don't make fun of me, i get bored easily and this got recommended to me on youtube :(
plus pls don't make fun of me, i get bored easily and this got recommended to me on youtube :(
It was about 11 PM when I knew I wanted to include a big ol' bullfrog in my image. From there, I began thinking about how I could incorporate a bullfrog into a movie poster without it seeming too gross. In the end, I decided to make it seem like the frog was an old ancient being that also happened to be where a little girl and her castle lives, which is inspired by Howl's Moving Castle. I also took inspiration from Life of Pi and their idea of an animal and a human travelling together and the tropes that come with it. From there, my vision for my finished piece was now complete and the only thing left to do was to bring it to life!
the process of creating
I first by resizing and masking the image of the frog. I flipped the image so it was facing the direction I wanted it to be in, and I fixed up the random bits of lighting that was on the original picture. Later on, I altered the colours of the frog and made it more desaturated to make it seem like the frog was an old, ancient entity rather than a fresh new frog with bright, vibrant colours. In order to do this, I made a separate layer and add splotches of colours in the appropriate areas. Then I changed the blending layer to Colour, giving off the look it has now. Afterwards, I continued onto the castle. While I was masking the building, I made sure that the building itself was masked with a hard brush and the greenery around it was masked with a soft brush to give it a more softer, feathery appearance. When I finished masking, I resized it to fit on top of the bullfrog's back. My next step was to mask the girl. Although it may not look like it, this part was one of the most detailed aspects of this poster. I started out with a stock image of the girl and carefully took out stock markings with the spot healing brush tool. To give her a more cute princess-y vibe, I gave her a nice puffy sleeve. The original picture of the sleeve was a different colour than the red of the girl's dress so I played around with the Hue/Saturation settings in the Adjustment tab. I did the best to make it seem as natural as can be to match her dress. Up next was her sun hat. I got an image of a hat I liked and removed the initial woman and patched up the missing gaps between the little girl and the hat. I altered the colours of the ribbon as well to agree with the girl's entire outfit. Once again, I experimented with the Hue/Saturation setting until I was satisfied with the results. To top off the hat, I put in a red flower I masked and made it seem like a cute design. Before I moved on, I made some last minute re-positioning to make sure everything matched up. Then voila! I completed (not really lol) the main focus on my project.
Next on the agenda was to work on the background or in other words, the scenery. I started with a pond as a base. Nothing too fancy schmancy with the water. Then I masked out tree trunk and placed it behind the frog to create a more 'swamp' vibe without it seeming too grimy. Then I added flowers to brighten up the place. If you looked closely, you can see that two of the flowers are actually the same flower! Wow! The white flower is the original, while the pink flower was recoloured by using the Colour Balance setting. To give the photo more depth, I brought it near the front and used the Field Blur filter. I did the same with the flower to the left and then added two other flowers in front of the tree trunk. Then I added clouds in the back to make it look like a very smoky mist. I did this by masking it with a soft brush and using two of the same images to layer on top of each other. Behind the clouds, I put in a nice picture of a mountain view. I used various colour filters on the mountain to change the lighting. This was definitely inspired by the Life of Pi poster. I played a lot with adding lights in my image. I used various blending modes to give off different levels of brightness, like Overlay, Vivid light, Lighten, etc. Also, I added reflections for the frog and the white flower. In order to do so, I made copies of each image and flipped them. I lowered the opacity and changed the blending mode to Overlay. After, I used the smudge tool to break the reflection and made it more realistic. To touch things up, I added some lens flares and added some shadows that are supposed to imitate a tree's shadow. To make it seem more natural, I used a brush to soften the bottom parts of the frog and the white flower to show that they're in the water.
For the text, I used a premade font provided by Photoshop to somewhat match the real title. However, for the word Frog, I masked it from the original The Princess And The Frog image. It started off as all white, so I added a gradient of green and yellow and to create the slimy appearance, I went Eyecandy and used the Ripple effect and played with the different settings to come up with the final outcome you see before you. And that's all ( i think ) I did create the image in front of you now! However, what you don't see that I did were the hidden layers that I made but were not used in the finished product. If you look at the layer list, you can see that I have provided labels or names for each one of them. Yes, I know that it is messy but it's what helped me get through it all. Like what I mentioned in the beginning, I spend a lot of time creating and discarding ideas. I am very decisive and I had many variations of my idea. For example, at one point, I wanted to create a night-like atmosphere, as well as a spooky one. You can see my star-filled background, dark-coloured filter, and the dark, spooky pirate ship. As you can see, that idea never set sail. A lot of thought and effort have been into my project and I'm proud to say I'm glad I went through with this idea.
Next on the agenda was to work on the background or in other words, the scenery. I started with a pond as a base. Nothing too fancy schmancy with the water. Then I masked out tree trunk and placed it behind the frog to create a more 'swamp' vibe without it seeming too grimy. Then I added flowers to brighten up the place. If you looked closely, you can see that two of the flowers are actually the same flower! Wow! The white flower is the original, while the pink flower was recoloured by using the Colour Balance setting. To give the photo more depth, I brought it near the front and used the Field Blur filter. I did the same with the flower to the left and then added two other flowers in front of the tree trunk. Then I added clouds in the back to make it look like a very smoky mist. I did this by masking it with a soft brush and using two of the same images to layer on top of each other. Behind the clouds, I put in a nice picture of a mountain view. I used various colour filters on the mountain to change the lighting. This was definitely inspired by the Life of Pi poster. I played a lot with adding lights in my image. I used various blending modes to give off different levels of brightness, like Overlay, Vivid light, Lighten, etc. Also, I added reflections for the frog and the white flower. In order to do so, I made copies of each image and flipped them. I lowered the opacity and changed the blending mode to Overlay. After, I used the smudge tool to break the reflection and made it more realistic. To touch things up, I added some lens flares and added some shadows that are supposed to imitate a tree's shadow. To make it seem more natural, I used a brush to soften the bottom parts of the frog and the white flower to show that they're in the water.
For the text, I used a premade font provided by Photoshop to somewhat match the real title. However, for the word Frog, I masked it from the original The Princess And The Frog image. It started off as all white, so I added a gradient of green and yellow and to create the slimy appearance, I went Eyecandy and used the Ripple effect and played with the different settings to come up with the final outcome you see before you. And that's all ( i think ) I did create the image in front of you now! However, what you don't see that I did were the hidden layers that I made but were not used in the finished product. If you look at the layer list, you can see that I have provided labels or names for each one of them. Yes, I know that it is messy but it's what helped me get through it all. Like what I mentioned in the beginning, I spend a lot of time creating and discarding ideas. I am very decisive and I had many variations of my idea. For example, at one point, I wanted to create a night-like atmosphere, as well as a spooky one. You can see my star-filled background, dark-coloured filter, and the dark, spooky pirate ship. As you can see, that idea never set sail. A lot of thought and effort have been into my project and I'm proud to say I'm glad I went through with this idea.
afterthoughts
Although this project took a while, the things I learned from it is totally worth the time. I experimented a lot, through exploring my own ideas as well as fooling around with tools I wasn't familiar with. I didn't use any tutorials because I learn better trying to figure things out myself. But for future references, I will probably look up tutorials and ask for help from my classmates because who knows, I could learn a lot more! What I wished I've done was actually take pictures of my process so I can see what I've done and how I could have done it differently a lot better. Also, I wished I would have chosen a clearer image of a bullfrog since it's clarity is foggier than the rest of the image. It was hard trying to match the sharpness of the other images since the frog picture was initially blurry itself. I could have used more styles as well since I didn't use a whole lot of it. I could have definitely done it on text rather using a preset, but I'll definitely do my own in the future. I also wished that I did more images as well. In the end, I really enjoy my poster.
evaluation
Putting in a lot of thought, I think I deserve a 90%. I put a lot of effort into my movie poster, as well as my artist statement. I spent some time after school working on this. Since I couldn't really work on the poster at home, that didn't stop me from working. I spend time figuring out ideas and making rough drafts. I gained so much knowledge from doing this and from what I've written up top as well as what I did on my poster, I would give myself a 90.