Self Portrait Assignment

How does one create a self-portrait that embodies all that one is? Well, one doesn't. One would have to create a book with pages and pages of images and descriptions! Trust me, if you saw how many hidden layers are in this project -- all the images I did not use -- you'd understand.

I believe we are all a collection of experiences, thoughts, and emotions. We are our past memories, our present experiences, and our dreams for the future.

The meaning the images hold for me:

Ocean - The vastness of our power, our depth, our ability to change, the ripples we spread onto others' shores and their ripples that touch and affect us.

Reflection on the ocean - The reflection on the ocean represents all the experiences, emotions, and memories of people, animals, nature .. all that has touched me and all the ways in which I reflect that back to the world..

The road - Represents passage of time, traveling through life, choices made or yet to be made.

The glowing orb - The light shining thorough this globe invokes all the mysteries of life, the curiosity inside of me which always seeks more. Stories within unfolding, bursting forth with surprise. Some uplift and guide, some are dark and frightening.. others are playful and free. Passion, creativity, insight. Also, I've always enjoyed science fiction stories about visiting other worlds and cultures - this orb looks like a very friendly planet. :)

The home with the clock tower - Where dreams come alive, where one feels safe, a place for warm memories

Cliffs - The home sits on a cliff, and the winding road is on the edge of a cliff. I often had dreams of cliffs as a child, and below there would always be new worlds to explore. Some were lush jungles and felt inviting; some were deserts with volcanoes and felt hot and dangerous.

The clock streetlights - Also represents passage of time.

The ivy on the first clock streetlight - A touch of whimsy and joy!

The illustrations (flying deer and cougar with dragon wings) - my creative side and love of stories. These illustrations are in a book I wrote about learning to listen to what one already knows deep inside.

The puppy within the orb - Represents my very strong love of animals and how much I value their friendship.

All of the human images, except for one, are of myself at various ages. The image of a dancing girl is of my daughter. Dancing has always been one of my passions and gives me a feeling of freedom and of total engagement .. meaning that the world around disappears and there is only myself and the music.

The Dance of Life: The joy, the balancing, the turning of a possible miss step into a beautiful new creation. Witnessing this in myself, in my children, and in childlike adults - feeling set free to dance again and again.

The Dance with Others: The importance of bringing a smile to others' faces, whether a loved one or a stranger. Giving when it's least expected... making someone's day just a little bit easier. Encouraging people, lighting a pathway that they were unable to see before.

Details:

The project was made up of images I photographed or illustrated (two were created with the pen tool), except for the ones of myself as a child. I even took all of the photos of myself as an adult, either with a timer or a webcam. There are 20 separate images in this project.

The images I placed onto the photograph of the open book needed to be "shaped" so that they would follow the curve of the page. I used the warp transition tool.. it's not perfect, as each time I would move one part.. another would move! I'll practice with warp..I'm sure it's just something to get used to, like the pen tool.

The self-portrait prior to being split and put onto the book's pages:





















Book Cover: Every book needs a cover!

Images representative of who I have been, who I am, and who I hope to become...

The Dance of Life: The joy, the balancing, the turning of a possible miss step into a beautiful new creation. Witnessing this in myself, in my children, and in childlike adults - feeling set free to dance again and again.

The Dance with Others: The importance of bringing a smile to others' faces, whether a loved one or a stranger. Giving when it's least expected... making someone's day just a little bit easier. Encouraging people, lighting a pathway that they were unable to see before.













The reflection on the ocean represents all the experiences, emotions, and memories of people, animals, nature .. all that has touched me and all the ways in which I reflect that back to the world.













The light shining thorough this globe invokes all the mysteries of life, the curiosity inside of me which always seeks more. Stories within unfolding, bursting forth with surprise. Some uplift and guide, some are dark and frightening.. others are playful and free.













This is an image of the home I spent most of my childhood and teenage years in. What began as a summer cabin grew into a full-sized home for a family of five, and many pets.

One's childhood home is filled with experiences that can shape one's life - yet one is not confined to only being shaped in childhood. If you allow it, life will continue to encourage you to grow and find new delights, secrets, and passions each day.

Fifteen Images

I selected these images as possible pieces of my self-portrait assignment. Most are photos of me taken at various ages. A few are illustrations I created, and there is even one of my dog, as I enjoying taking photos of our pets - and just about everything else!

Line Drawing w Texture from Bitmap

In this assignment I outlined the main image element (the frog) using the pen tool, and gave the outline a fill color. I also made the lip line thicker and I added some claws on the frog for fun!

I used curves and gradients to modify the colors. The frog was originally a pale tan color, and the rocks were not blue.

Color Techniques

Four photographs were used for this project: Street Lights in San Francisco, Amethyst, Birds, and Clouds. I photographed each of these elements within the past month.

I first used color range to select an amethyst I had photographed. I thought it would be easy, but it wasn't! I then selected the glass in the street lamps and pasted the amethyst into each lamp. I used hue/saturation layer adjustments to change the color of both amethysts, and I experimented with changing the colors in curves. I feel there is a lot more control and variety in the curves option. I pasted an image of flying bird just above one of the lamps, (oh, I smart sharpened it before bringing it over to the main document). Then I used color range on a photo of clouds and brought the clouds and placed it in the lower sky behind the lamp post. I tried various colors, and decided not to get too "out there". The edges around the cloud are dark, but even though it doesn't look realistic, I liked the contrast it gave to the clouds. There is a gradient overlay on the entire image.

Also, I did play with some filters and changed the clouds.. using the cutout filter, and then transformed it and stretched it a lot. It gave the image a very different feel, but I'm submitting the more "realistic" one to my instructor. This is the more "playful, comic-bookish" background:























While using color range, I saw an effect which I really liked, so I took a screen shot of the grayscale image:

















Below are the four original photos I used for this assignment:

A Cloudy Sky In San Francisco

The original photograph was taken on a completely clear day in San Francisco - not a cloud in the sky! For this masking assignment clouds were added using Filter > Render > Clouds. Hue and Saturation were adjusted on the cloud selection to create blue tones that would work well with the rest of the image.

Charles Dickens Compilation

1. I set up an open book (A Tale of Two Cities, The Heritage Press, 1938) sitting on closed book (The Pickwick Papers, The Heritage Press, 1938) , resting on blue and gold fabric, and photographed it. This became my background layer. I corrected the image using exposure, levels, and hue/sat.

2. I placed a decorative pocket watch against three books, photographed it, and later selected the watch, pasted it within the blue/gold portion of the background and partially behind the open book. I lowered the opacity to make it somewhat transparent, and increase the saturation a little.

3. I selected a photograph of my son, desaturated it, and changed it's hue. I pasted it into the middle foreground of the composition, and reduced the opacity to give it a ghostly appearance.

4a. I photographed an illustration from the story, A Christmas Carol on page 61 (of Five Christmas Novels , The Heritage Press, 1939) titled, Bob Cratchit Comes Home. I lowered the opacity and ..... I pasted it into the background, lowered the opacity, changed the hue, refined the edges and modified the upper right edge so that it flowed along the same direction as the page of the book it is next to. (I used the line tool to make a line to follow along with and then turned off its visibility afterwards.)

4b. Using the same image, I decided to try out creating a 3D object. (I recently joined NAPP, and received a Photoshop User magazine which gave basic instructions on how to create 3D objects.) I wrapped the images around a spherical shape and then rotated the image so that Tiny Tim and his father would be visible. I added some light to the illustrated sphere, and then pasted it into the background. I played around with hues and levels, increased the saturation, and the object began to become very shiny and reminded me of a Christmas ball. I thought this fit perfectly with the theme of A Christmas Carol, and it is now one of my favorite parts of the composition.

5. Text is used in three different areas.

a. For the quote "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times..." on the clock, I first created a circle with the ellipse tool and made it a work path. Using the type tool I pasted my text onto the circular path - and then copied and pasted this over the clock. Since the clock is not shaped in a perfect circled, I then changed the skew and played around with it until matched the clock's skew as well as possible.

b. For the two other quotes, I gave both a lighter color for the top layer, and a darker one for the shadow, to compensate for the mix of lighter and dark shades in the composition they were being placed on.

I placed the quote, "Please sir, may I have some more?" below the ghostly image of the boy, to make it clear that he is representing Oliver Twist.

c. I placed the quote:

"No words can express the secret agony of my soul as I sunk into the companionship: compared these every day associates with those of my happier childhood; and felt my early hopes of growing up to be a learned and distinguished man, crushed in my breast."

~ Charles Dickens as a boy in the blacking factory

over the larger image of Tiny Tim and his family as it seemed to be a place where such a large amount of text would fit gracefully, without distracting from the other elements. The Tiny Tim illustration is also used in the Christmas Ball, and he and his father can clearly be viewed there, so I felt the larger image could serve as more of a background to the quoted text. I experimented with justifying the text, but found that I liked have the control over where the lines would break in relation to their meaning, and decided to align the text to the left (ragged right).

Surrealism Project

I created the coyotes and the mask-like faces with the pen tool. I converted the coyote and the two faces into shapes and then transformed their sizes and experimented with many, many blending options. The mauve/brown face on the right looked very nice in PSD format, but when I saved the file as JPG, the white outer glow appears jagged. I resaved the PSD file as 8x10 JPG, and the jags smoothed out a little.

I photographed my own hand and made it look comic bookish using the cutout filter and also plastic wrap filter. Used blending options and experimented quite a bit with color and gradients.

I photographed the clock at the Santa Cruz Boardwalk; it is part of the haunted ride attraction. I used curves to correct the dullness of the image, tranformed it's size and perspective, and used some blending modes to soften the edges.

The apple is part of a watercolor painting that I did several years ago.

The purple planet was actually a photo of flowers which I converted into a 3D sphere and then added texture to it. Put a touch of an outer glow on it to help it blend with the sky.

The clouds along the bottom (which kind of also look like an ocean to me) required a lot of adjustments.. stretching and pulling..

The stars were created with the star brush tool.

The background is two parts; a basic color first, then an overlay with an elliptical shape deleted and a gaussian blur put on it.. then on top of that was a quadrone gradient.

Color Theme ~ Boardwalk

The source of three of the images were from a series of photos that I took at the Santa Cruz Boardwalk this summer. The beach scene was taken in Santa Cruz two years ago.

The color theme was "fun, bright, and vibrant"! The serenity of the beach background with the seagull carrying the banner is a melding of the excitement of the boardwalk with the stunning beauty of nature.

Each image required quite a bit of adjustment, as the photographs were shot on overcast days. The beach/ocean scene was taken during the day, but I modified it so that it appeared to be taken at sunset. I felt that the darker, more saturated, colors of the evening made the colors of the forefront items pop out more. I enlarged and moved the bird that was in the sky, and distorted the shape of the banner it is carrying.

Lizard on Building

I enjoy having fun with Photoshop - I don't think much explanation is required; I obviously enlarged the image of the lizard. I had to modify him in order to make his body appear to be coming from behind the building. Also, I put a shadow on the building underneath the lizard's head and neck. I was so happy to finally discover how to use "opacity"!