Photoshop Flat-pack

This blog post cover my work over the start of the flat-pack project to the 16th of Febuary

Today I made a start on my flat-pack project so I wanted to carry on with the idea of people un and leaving Norwich and then what the city look likes ten years later, lucky I’ve already gone out and taken photographs of places (see on page 3) that I wanted to experiment, none of these locations are definitive for my final pieces it’s just so that I can get an idea of what I want my image to look like. I looked through all my images. I chose one that was in a privet retardant area this image was quite plain which meant that it had a lot of room for change. I started by adding grass and fugie to the greener areas then trees for these I used the colour picker as the png files were too light. For the windows, I used a combination of dirt (that I just changed the colour) and moss, I deceased the opacity so that you could still see thought the window, I also feathered the edges because they were too hard and when I zoomed out you could easy notice them.

Today I carried on with the windows and glass door just adding some dirt png and changing the colour to a murky green/black, I then added 2 more tees, grass, moss around the base of these tree. One of the thing that becoming a clear problem is the lack of dirt and grit on the building when doing some research, I always see these black marks near drains, cracks on buildings after showing my work to James he noticed that straight away so I used the brush tool (set the hardness to 20%) and painted around drains, open pipes and those extractors on the side of building. This really gave the image a sense of grimness, I’m still a fair bit off but I’m glad that I’ve got a solution to that problem.

Today was a slow day because for the most part I was zooming in on the drains and painting under them to make their shadows look like dirt (so this took ages) after this I looked at some images of park benches and lamp post just to see how nature affects them, benches normally get grass at the legs and moss covering the rest, lamppost are similar expect the plastic at the top gets these specs of “dirt” (it’s a type of fugie). I finally got around to cropping my image as I had too much open space of nothingness and now looks fresher and clear one of my worries was that it would be too packed in but that snot the case.

I went into the city to take some photographs to expand my library there aren’t a lot of PNG files that I can use. I’ve decided on duke street as my location so I took the photograph from the bridge upwards getting both universities and part of the street leading to the road my plan is to add tree into the far background dot them all over the place, add ivy, moss, black algae (near the drain pipes). So, after I took serval photos of duke street, I went around the river side looking for moss, grass, algae, wooded boards and graffiti also some trash bins, anything that I could use to show a dilatated street. Overall today was fine got some great photos of a door that’s had its paint scraped off the ends is all chew so its prefect, I also got some broken/ cracked windows which is great as the PNG files sucked.

I woke up early so that I could go into town and take my photographs, the shoot went well the lighting was prefect and there wasn’t anybody there so that was another plus afterwards I cycled down to the cathedral manged to find an old abandoned house with boarded/ cracked window. I’m about half an hour into my photoshop edit, it’s getting harder as moss PNG files don’t match colour wise, I’ve tried colour overlay and selected any moss already in the photo I also used colour glow to reduces some of the white highlights that the ivy had. Overall I’m not too convinced on how the image looks feel like the slap-comps looked better as the elements blende in in better, going to start working on my Victorian flat-pack as a backup.

There hasn’t been much progress, still trying to make the PNG files match colour wise. The trees, moss stains, long grass weeds there looking good but the ivy still stands out. I’ve added some trash by the sides of the walls figured people would just dump their rubbish near the bins. By the end of the week I’m hoping to have finished the photoshop portion of this project and have moved it onto nuke.