Monday, December 8, 2008
Jay's Final Project - The Frog Prince
Wow… you ever have that dream where you’re cutting out pieces of pictures and meticulously moving them around and you just can’t stop? Photo collages are a lot of fun, but man are they a lot of work.
Where to begin? I’ve also been taking a children’s literature course this semester and early on I thought I might want to illustrate The Frog King (or Prince) from The Juniper Tree and Other Tales of Grimm. I had taken a number of pictures of a frog last summer and thought it would make a great model for this project. I also had a ton of castle pictures and knew I could work them in too. And so, I combined these pictures and many others to create this fairytale slideshow.
It’s hard for me to explain what I’ve done; there was just so much to it. For the most part, I used the magic lasso a lot to isolate elements from pictures, as well as to create borders for my clone tool. I also used stencils often to frame a shape and cloned in the pattern I wanted, like the back of a frog’s head and the frame of a Barbie doll. The color replacement pen came in handy, as did the twirl filter to represent a curse both being made and broken. I also found that adjusting opacity and feathering created a lot of great effects.
I originally planned to show movement in every picture (the frog hopping, the finger waving, the princess skipping, the princess running) but my wife suggested limiting it to the ball, finger, and transformations, which I think was the right idea.
The castle in this story is Eilean Donan in Scotland; these pictures were taken last summer during our Great Britain vacation. The princess is modeled from various Barbie and Disney princess pictures I image-searched – the well, yellow ball, prince, and castle innards were also borrowed for educational purposes. What took me the longest was making my wife the princess and I the king; I considered not doing this, but the Barbie face just wasn’t doing it for me. If I had more time I’d continue working on these, but oh well.
As a last note: this is later than I hoped because many of my pictures are over 100mgs and my computer is having the hardest time opening and closing files.
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5 comments:
Hi Jay,
Nice slide show. It went so fast it was hard to absorb. I checked a few times, and reallt like it. I got mine up, after MUCH agro,...there is music with it, so turn up your volume a little. I hope you can see it, you might need flas, dont know why this was so very hard, except my upload speed is very slow. Good work, great story. Diana
I think it great that you created a story similar to the ones for children. I had to open the photos in Google Photos, because the slideshow was a little too fast. You used a lot of the tools we learned in the class, but I am curious how you made the two photos of the transforming prince and princess?
Let's see. First I took a sample of the gravel walkway outside the castle (see original slideshow) and used the twirl filter to created that circular effect. Next I loaded my four pictures and adjusted the transparency of each layer (100%, 80%, 60%, 40%, or something like that) making the first action the most transparent. [I realized today that, although the princess' layer had at one point been transparent, I must had turned this off and forgot to do it again, but the face I added was see through.] Then I used color replacement. On the prince, I also added an additional face layer over the third frog, used transparent, lined up the two sets of eyes, nose, and mouth as best I could, deleted where the frog eyes peered through, and left the nose and mouth showing. Oh, and I added a tiara and crown to the frogs as well.
Each photo had many steps and I'm just grateful to have used actions to flatten and shrink them quickly.
Very very very fun. So much detailed work and the result shows it! I too love Grimms and did not give my kids watered down fairy tales. Great composition and layering...
http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/frogking.html
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