For this photo manipulation piece, I decided to have fun with it and construct a scene of robots at a disco. I am a huge fan of Eric Joyner (www.ericjoyner.com). I love his oil paintings, and I’m crazy about retro robots. Lately I have been really into drawing robots in my personal artwork, and wanted to start collecting them. I did a Google image search for ‘toy robot’ and found a ton of retro robot pictures. Many of them came from www.robotisland.com or www.retrotoys.com; a few others came from various sites just grabbed off of the Google image search. I chose images of retro robots and toys that where just the figure on a white or mono-colored background, so I could easy remove the backgrounds in Photoshop.
After I gathered a bunch of robot pictures, I realized some of them were facing slightly to the left and some slightly to the right. Some were even positioned slightly less angled, and I realized I could put the robots in a semi-arc, as if they were all standing around watching something, but what? Another robot tearin’ it up on the dance floor, of course! The hardest thing to find was the right background. Eventually I got the green disco lights by searching on flicker.com for “disco lights”.
I began with a 1600 x 1200 canvas in Photoshop. I popped in the background of lights, and then used new layers for each of the various robot placements from other pictures. I rotated or ‘flip[ped] horizontal’ some of the robots in order to get a more even crowd of onlookers. For the robots in the middle: on one set I inverted the colors to have them appear different, then I copied one of the robots and used hue/saturation to change it to pink. Stacking the robots via layers, I created an ‘FX’ style for the layers of a 5pt black Stroke, and an Outer Glow comprised of the light and dark greens of the background. I chose to give them all an outline to make this look more uniform and give a realistic yet sketchy-feel. Giving them a ‘diffuse’ Outer Glow allowed it to look like the green lights were reflecting off their various metal surfaces and pouring through the various gaps in the crowd. After finding the main dancing robot in Google image search, I gave him a 7pt Stroke and a purple Outer Glow to bring focus to the foreground. After all this, I thought it needed a floor, and after extensive searches for ‘disco floor’ I found the one I used, and tailored it to fit my image using Scale. The purple on the main dancing robot matches the purple/blue from the floor. The final touch came when I added in a disco ball, to which I added a small lens flare using filters. Below is the 800x600 version. Click on it to download the original, which is hosted on some personal webspace.
This is great. I would not know how to cite the sources but it charming and has a nice social edge to it. I will use it for future classes as ab example of a good poster with your permission of course. Jon
ReplyDeleteI like this. The colors of all the robots stand out great. I like how you added the black outline around each one, it makes each one stand out on it's own. Looks like a party!
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