Composited Images

For this assignment, we had to composite, or combine, two or more images into one.

One of our composted images had to be made up of two of our abstract pictures we took last week. The picture above is the close-up of a fork, made to look like the prongs are sticking through a blacklight bulb. I achieved this effect by first putting the blacklight bulb over the picture of the fork, lowering its opacity to give it the see-through quality of a lightbulb. I then used the magnetic lasso tool to select both the left and right sides of the prongs, copying them, and then pasting each of them into its own separate layer above the lightbulb. By rounding the edges it looks like the prongs are cutting through a round object.

The image above is the empty shell of a cracked egg, with two flowers put into the egg. I changed the brightness of the flower to better match the lighting in the original egg picture, although I'm not too happy with how that came out (by this time I had not learned much about lighting yet). First I selected the cracked inner edges of the eggshell and cut them out of the picture. I then imposed the flowers into the empty egg, and pasted the cracked edges over the flowers, giving the illusion that they are inside the egg.

I found this image to be a lot more difficult than I thought, and I am not happy with the way it came out. I wanted to make it look as if a ship were being swallowed by a wave, keeping the viewer wondering whether the wave was large or the boat was miniature. In the spirit of only using my own images, however, the only suitable picture I had of a ship was from far away, so I could not get that bluish quality of sky away from the ship's masts without erasing the masts or drawing them over, which did not look good. I cropped part of the wave to make it seem as if it were crashing over the ship, although it did not come out so well. 

Three Abstract Images

Three Abstract Images

This first image (as well as the other two) were taken by my iPhone (luckily I have now acquired a better camera). It's a close-up of the condensation inside a water bottle, held up against the light; I liked the sort of scaly pattern the droplets created.

This second image is a close-up of a fork, with a bit of egg between the prongs (is that what you call them? Teeth, maybe?). I was eating breakfast when inspiration struck, because I like the idea of how the closer you look at an everyday object, the more abstract it becomes. I also think this picture has some interesting colors.

The third image is of a closeup of a blacklight bulb. I liked how this picture seemed at first glance to look like some kind of planet, and the black circle behind it perhaps an eclipsed moon. 

First IMM Assignment: Three Photoshop Paintings

15-minute Self Portrait
This self-portrait was the first of the three images and took about fifteen minutes to make, mainly because more than half of it is just the background filled with a design from the paintbucket tool. I just wanted something simple for my self portrait, and because of the time limit the arm came out looking like pantyhose filled with lumpy potatoes.

30-minute Drawing of Choice

Although this painting of jellyfish took a half-hour to make, it was the last of the three (mainly because by the time I reached my third painting I had familiarized myself with the basic photoshop tools). I've always been fascinated by jellyfish and I tried to replicate that kind of candle-like glow of the Japanese Sea Nettles. 

60-minute Landscape Drawing

This was the second of the three paintings I made, and took an hour because I needed to familiarize myself with the brush and pen tools. The water is a separate layer with its top edge blurred to look like the sea, and the ship's reflection is a reversed image of the original ship (same goes for the clouds/sun/birds). I used the blur tool to make the reflections shimmery. 

About Me

My name is Mark Marsella, and this blog will be a showcase of my work done in my Interactive Multimedia class.