What the Animal?! // Using Layers
In this class, we were all taught about the use of layers and why it is important to understand how far it can be utilised. In every single application or site, layers are used to display a design or how everything is displayed. But Adobe has shown itself more than others in how it layers in ways that seem complicated and difficult. Layers can be seen as sheets on a page with different aspects to each other them so that manipulating it would be easy. Layers consists of: Text, Images, and Shapes. However people tend to confuse layers because they are categorised as two different types; stacking layers and adjustment layers.
Stacking layers are simply just sheet that are added where any sort of change made to it is permanent and can not go back to the originality unless starting from the start once again. Whereas adjustment layers are totally different from these because it adds and edits the colour, brightness and contrast of an image without affecting the image to which you want to make changes.
Being asked to make this sort of design, I was a little uncomfortable because I was uncertain about how this was going to be done. This was a very crazy project as it is using something that is out of the ordinary and implementing them into the human aspects. In all honesty, I was having a bunch of issues when it came to adding the those aspects because it was not looking realistic at all. I have not been good at making extra images look like they are a part of the image. Here, I will be explaining each section and layer of the image giving total complete detail about the process that was made.
The first thing that was added was the elegant Dove wing on my shoe. I had the idea because of Greek Mythology and also some inspiration from the movie; Percy Jackson & The Olympians: The Lightning Thief. Within the Greek Mythology, there is a God who is very iconic for having winged ankles/shoes; that is Hermes. The main reason to why they have this feature is because they were classified as the Messenger God who had to travel from realms in the speed of light. This influences the directors of the movie Percy Jackson because they reference this by Luke giving Percy a pair of converses but they have wings on the outside. It was a way to modernise this because I do not think that it would not make sense at all to wear sandals in this movie. This then became my inspiration and I added it to my image. Looking for a realistic looking wing was a very difficult task but once I found this one, it just worked perfectly. To make it look more realistic, I had to add shadows so that it blends in well with the other layers of the images. I think that, it ended up going well and looks great.
The second feature that I had added is an obvious one - "The Reindeer Antlers". Since Christmas was approaching, I wanted to get into the Christmas Spirit so I decided to give myself some antlers because I was not in the mood for a Christmas Hat or anything like that; also reindeer antlers seem more animalistic then anything else. Here What I needed to do is darken the image a little so that it matches the contrast and colour for the rest of the image. After that, I had to separate it because I found it as two antlers but only need one. Once I add the lighting and shadows to the antler according to the position of the sun, all I needed to do was duplicate that one antler and just revert the lighting and shadows. This was the easy bit, the difficult part was positioning it to go aligned with the hair and have to be faded in so that it looks like it actually belongs. The end results turned out amazing and I am happy with how it came out; impressed and proud of myself, but I still felt like something was missing.
As I was adding the reindeer antlers and the dove wings, I thought it was best to go full out with this image and make a human representation of Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer. I believe that they would be have wings on their shoes to make it modern and to not look as weird as wings on our back. The one thing that would finish this whole image was to add a red nose to complete the look. Again, I had to add the shadows and sunlight to the nose and reshape the nose so that it fits how it would look like for the reindeer. If I were to add more items, I personally do not think that it would look good at all because it ruins the picture.
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