The Creative Process

Phurther Phriday PhotoShop Phoolishness

Sometimes, you just want to pound your head against a wall...

There's this terrible disconnect between the image you see in your skull, and the results you're able to turn out with your current skill level, no matter what the medium is.

As it stands, I'm a pretty miserable hack when it comes to image manipulation. It's frustrating beyond belief when you have a clear image of what you want to accomplish, but you just don't have the technical chops to make it happen.

I suspect this is why so many artists, writers and other creative types are hopeless argumentative drunks and addicts...

I'm slowly improving, but it's kind of like losing weight. The results never happen as quickly or as painlessly as you'd like them to.

When I'm looking for my next PhotoShop project, I like to start out with as large a picture as possible. The more detail you begin with, the less fudging and cloning you need to do later on in the process.

So, I'm cruising through some wallpaper forums on the web, and come across this nice pic of a nekkid gal posing by a mountain lake. Hell, could be a fjord, for all I know...

It's a spectacular picture, 2.3 MB, and 3000 x 2000 pixels. By contrast, the pics below are about 400 x 400 pixels. And, of course, she's nekkid, which is always a plus!

Since a lot of you read at work, here's a sanitized version:


I'm thinking to myself, "What could make this picture better?", and slowly an idea forms. This gal needs some angel wings! I'll turn her into some Nordic angel/valkyrie hybrid up in a fjord!

Of course, you first need some wings...

It's not easy, finding a picture of angel wings in a large enough resolution to fit your background, but I eventually came across this pic:


Next, remove anything that doesn't look like an angel wing.


Then, flip the image, copy/paste and thereby double your wings.


Now, there's a long drawn-out process of resizing, sampling, cloning, blurring, and judicious use of the fuzzy select and magic lasso.

Eventually, you wind up with this:


Somewhere towards the end, I realized that I couldn't really put a nekkid angel on my blog, 'cause I don't have that "Look Under The Fold" widget installed. So, time to put some clothes on the angel! Finally, I end up with this:


You wanna know what's *really* annoying? The damn bikini came out a lot better than the angel wings, which was the main idea of the project... As Dax Montana says: "JUST DAMN!"

Total time spent? Maybe 4 hours, not counting the web searching.