I've never been a fan of having my picture taken, not even when I was little. For this project, I wanted to use photos and pieces of artwork I've created in the past to make the portraits. Many images are from Ireland, and I've got three or four from when I was a really little kid. My main goal for this was to get more familiar with photoshop and the mac, since I've used windows for years, but I also wanted to create beautiful images. I tried to make the newly combined images look like they've always been together, and some of them were meant to remain as photos. There are even a few that are designed to look like paintings.
This project, while it was very time-consuming and admittedly more frustrating than I dreamed, was very educational. By and large, I am satisfied with all of the images, and extremely pleased with a few of them. In the future, I hope to use illustrator in conjunction with photoshop. (don't forget to look at the older posts for the rest of the images).

Project 1: 10 Self-Portraits

The ten images below this are all part of the first project, and they took a very long time. Each of he images is as close in size as I could get them, and the longest side on all of them is 800 pixels. Most of them are 800 by 600, but a few of the ones I cropped are 800 by some wierd number of pixels. Anyway, I hope everyone enjoys.

I thought this turned out fairly well, considering all of the trouble I had with it. I scanned two separate images of myself into ps, then combined them. I thought the similar poses of myself would look cute together. One photo, the one on the right, was professionally done ad of a much better quality than the rest. I cut around myself with the lasso tool, then added film grain. Then, seeing that there was too much, I tried to balance it out by adding the same filter to the low res picture. Then I somehow added film grain again to the one on the right, and ended up needing to fix the background again. In the end, I couldn't get the two separate photos to look exactly like one, so I had to play around a bit more, and put a poster filter on the background photo to hide the join. While the two photos don't mesh as well as I hoped, the outcome is still good.
Just a note, that is a real dear behind me, and yes, it was part of the original photo. I don't remember how we managed to get so close to a doe, but the photo is amazing, despite being seventeen years old.

This was another challenging but fun one. It's a picture of me as a little girl, wearing the same outfit as an earlier portrait, but it was a fairly low resolution photo. I scanned it into ps, got most of the red eye out, then scanned in a drawing of one wing I did earlier. I cut close to the wing, copied and rotated it, then placed the wings and cut them to fit around myself. I then applied brush filters to the original photo, and applied the same brush filter and a film grain to the wings. Last of all, if made the wings translucent. I'm glad I was able to downplay the red eye with the brush filter.

Another one from Ireland. This one, well, the castle is beautiful. I cut around my image, shrunk it down and placed it in the picture. Can you find me? I though it would be fun at least.

This one didn't turn out as good as I hoped. The landscape is another photo from Ireland, as is the pose I'm in. I intended to replace the fountain with a photo of myself, and it worked I guess. I do like the way my red shirt stands out in from the green though, and the landscape is beautiful.

This one was very challenging. The landscape is an acrylic painting I did myself. I had to take a photo of it, and because of the size, I couldn't get the whole thing straight o without casting my shadow on it, so (after it was in photoshop) I spent probably 40 minutes trying to adjust the perspective without distorting the painting too badly. Then I scanned a photo of myself at three into photoshop and placed myself in my landscape. I applied a brush filter and an artistic filter to make it look like a part of the painting, copied the image and flipped the copy. Then I skewed it to get the reflection in the water, and set the transparencies for both to make them look like a part of the original painting. Did it work reasonably well?

I took a photo of my shadow, then of my surroundings, and put them together. I changed the perspective on my shadow, darkened it, and enlarged it. I thought it had an interesting, almost haunting look.

No, this is not a real tattoo. I took the dragons (Ireland) and a photo of my right wrist and combined them. The dragons I lightened and faded (after adjusting the perspective), and it turned out well.

This one was one of the easiest. I had to change the orientation of the background (Also from Ireland), but then I faded out my image, lightened it, and applied overlay (I think).I really like the simplicity of this one, and while I don't generally like yellow, I think the flowers work really well with the ruins behind them.

This is the second piece. The Mandala is one I made myself, and the original is too large for a scanner, so I took a photo of it, rearranged the perspective so that it was straight on instead of slanted, and darkened the black parts. I added a filter to the image in the background (also from Ireland) and faded the mandala. I know I'm not in this one, but I hate having my picture taken, and the whole point of a self-portrait is to show yourself, and I feel that the best way to do that is through my art work. That said, I am in all of the others, but I just didn't want to take attention away from the mandala this time.

After a lot of work, I managed to get tihs image done. It combines three photos, two of which I took myself. The middle ground photo is from Ireland when I went over the summer. I took out that sky and added a sunset picture I took from my backyard, then put a photo of myself on the very top and made it more translucent. I added a filter effect to the middle ground, and was done with it.