[VISC102] Project 5 - Fauxscape
This piece represents the turning of the seasons from fall to winter. Fall has always been my favorite season for it's beautiful colors and clement weather, but Winter comes up as a close second, held back only by it's frigid nature. The divide between reality and reflection felt like the perfect foil to showcase the surreal, almost other-worldly realization that the seasons have turned once again. Swans are symbols of elegance and tranquility, and so I used them to highlight the natural beauty of these seasons.
Final Piece
Process GIF
Step 1
I began with the base image of a fall forest by a lake. I specifically looked for an image that had a fairly straight coastline to make the editing process easier. I cropped the image a bit to fit the size requirements of the assignment.
Step 2
Next, I overlaid an image of a winter forest upside-down where the water would have been. I used a linear gradient on the masking layer to make sure that some of the fall forest's reflection was still visible on the winter side - this increase the sense that this was another world visible underneath the water, giving the winter forest the qualities of water despite not actually being a reflection. I had played around before with using the actual reflection of the winter forest in the image instead, but I felt that it didn't have as much of a 'winter' vibe since it seemed more like I had just replaced the water texture and poorly matched the colors. I think this alternative still creates an effect of a reflection in a lake without it actually being one.
Step 3
I really didn't like the dark spot on the left side of the fall forest, so I covered it up by repeating the same image a couple times and blending it with masking to make it appear as if it was one continuous image. This did disturb the coastline, but I covered that up in the next step.
Step 4
Here I added a waterfall along the left side of the image. This was actually two separate images of a waterfall combined to make a continuous flow. There is still a lot of blending to do here, but I take it one step at a time.
Step 5
Here I added more rock work down the left side of the image, creating a more visually interesting coastline than the flat one of the original image. I once again used different parts of the same image repeatedly with creative use of blending.
Step 6
Here I recolored the rocks on the left side with a hue/saturation layer to make them fit into the image a bit better, as well as adding a waterfall on the right side and the two swans, who were also recolored with a hue/saturation layer to give them a more blue tone as opposed to yellow.
Step 7
Here I added the center waterfall which was a blend of several different waterfalls.
Step 8
Finally, I added a hue/saturation layer over the whole image to bring the colors out a bit more, and used some Photoshop water splash brushes along the rock work on the left to blend the water and the rocks together a bit better.
Photos Used
