Graphic design student Anna Hoffman shares the story of a design
Since I am taking summer classes as well as working, life has been pretty hectic. Well, the good news is that I have something new I designed. It is more of an inspirational piece but I hope you like it!
My piece is called Beauty Is. I didn’t really have a concept in mind when I was designing this piece, it all kinda flowed together on its own. It’s super late right now but I guess I just had a surge of creative energy! The model in the design is yours truly. And the boy in the design is my brother.
My design process for this piece is pretty similar to my design process of my other pieces. For me, a design usually starts with an interesting photo. My siblings and I were just being silly by dressing up and modeling, but I really liked how this particular image turned out, so I decided that I wanted to play around with it, see what I could do.
First I edited the photo and then it dawned on me that I could do something completely crazy with it. Since, the image had a lot of movement in it, I thought it would be cool if I placed myself and my brother in another scene. Therefore, I found another image on a creative commons website, of a city with cobble streets. It looked like Europe, so I thought it would work perfectly with the image.
I then decided to take myself and my brother out of the image, using quick selection in Photoshop CS 5.1. The edges were a little choppy so I refined them using the “refine edge” tool. The whole project took about 3 hours to complete. I experimented a little bit with the colors in the cobble streets image (background of design). One of the hardest challenges of using pieces of two different images is making them look realistic together, there are a variety of different variables that affect it. For example, the two images were shot with completely different cameras and by two completely different people, one image was took inside and the other was took outside.
I edited the photos very minimally, I increased the brightness and contrast, but the colors were definitely the hardest part. I decided that in order for the image to work cohesively together, the colors would have to match in similar colors. I desaturated (took the color out of the image) the background image and then added a color gradient over the image. I repeated the process with the image of my brother and I.
So long story short, I continued to just play with different things and elements until I was happy with how it looked. I added the brush frame element just for some flare, added an inspirational verse, and waaa laa, it was finished.
Well, I hope you enjoyed this post, thanks for reading another inside look for Behind the Screen.
This story was first published on Anna Hoffman’s blog: Behind The Screen.