This snake-rabbit was created for this visual assignment. I thought the premise of this assignment was really cool. I always jump at the opportunity to make funky images in Photoshop, so this assignment was probably the most fun I have had in the class so far!

For the source images I used the website called public domain pictures so I wouldn’t have to worry about any copyright infringement! I was quite pleased with the website and will probably keep coming back there through the remainder of this semester.

As for the overall process of creating the image it was pretty tricky. It took a lot of googling to get exactly what I wanted. The first thing I googled was “how to map a texture onto another texture in Photoshop”, this came up with a whole bunch of results. They all sort of worked to help me in achieving the final effect I was looking for.

The first step was cropping the Rabbit out of its background, this was easy using the magic wand tool. After that I used the selection menu to reduce the selected area by 5 pixels as to remove the boarder around the rabbit. After this I created a mask that was the shape of the rabbit excluding the eyes, because I didn’t want to map the snake texture onto the rabbits eyes. After that I spent some time getting the snake image to tile perfectly. Then I applied the mask over the snake scales so they only fit the image, then I set the layer to overlay, this made it kind of wrap around the rabbit. I added some selective blurring as to make the rabbit look a little less cut out! Voilà!

Strange, right? McNulty and Stringers becoming best friends. I remember the first time in The Wire where they talked and Stringer drew that mean picture. Anyways, maybe they were best friends at one point. Like Professor Xavier and Magneto, yeah? Who knows. For my first assignment with my Final Project, i chose the “Opposites Attract Meme”. GIMP is by far my favorite application to use for photo editing so i’ve kind of gotten the hang of it. Just because i’m good with GIMP doesn’t mean this assignment was easy! I already knew how to do the whole crop head thing. I did a tutorial on it in the beginning of the semester, here! My biggest issue was trying to choose the right photo. There are few scenes with McNulty and Stringer, yet alone one where they are both having a good time. I ended up choosing a photo of McNulty and Bunk hanging out at the bar, as usual.

Now, Bunk’s facial structure is way different from Stringer’s. Let’s just say Bunk’s face is a bit more round. So i had to morph stringers face a little bit and smudge some of his face to make it look KIND of normal. I’m not a fantastic photo editor so you can see where there are some mess ups. My next step was to choose a picture of Stringer that was from a similar angle and looked good for this bar scene. I went through a couple of google images pages until i found this gem. It’s not from The Wire but from The Office instead. There wasn’t too much of a difference. I think this Stringer may have more grey hair but that’s all. After i cut out his head, i saved it and added it to the bar scene. I’ll repost some directions below. Here’s the original picture of Stringer!

Now after a couple of hours of work, here’s the final piece! Opposites do attract!

Instructions:

Death (Process)

Like I said, this thing was the hardest to make considering i’ve never used GIMP before, except for the GIfs and we all know how those turned out… My first step was to find the right picture of Will Smith and Jada. Just look at their bodies. They look so happy and Jada is enjoying a snow cone of some sort. What else could you ask for? Then came Avon and Stringer. Avon was the easiest head to crop because it worked the first time. Here are the steps for cropping:

Cut Head:

What I did here was open GIMP and chose the scissor icon thinking it would cut, and yes, it did! I cut around Avon and Stringer’s heads. After not knowing what to do next, I watched this tutorial which helped me a lot.

Layers: As the tutorial says, you go under the “Layer” menu and choose transparency then choose “Add Alpha” which I did.

Select: Now you go under the “Select” menu and choose “Invert”. After invert you now have the background selected. Now go under “Edit” and press clear.

DON’T FORGET PNG LIKE ME!: Now, Please… Please… don’t forget to save the image as a PNG so the background is not white. I was stuck on this for almost 2 hours wondering why my background wasn’t transparent. Then after emailin/tweeting/bothering Groom, he gave me his words of wisdom. Keep in mind, this whole process is just for cutting the heads out…. There’s more.

Open As Layers: Yes, open the pictures as layers. From here, you select the tool that is for moving layers and you shift the floating heads over the bodies of the soon to be headless. That’s really all it takes. I wish i could say that with more sincerity but this process was frustrating for me. Hopefully you will avoid frustration.

Stars: 4

Week 5: Visual Assignment #2

Choosing and Brainstorming
For my second visual assignment, I chose to create an Opposites Attract Meme by taking two opposite animals and creating a hybrid animal. I immediately thought about lions and zebras (I’ve seen too much National Geographic), and thought the combination would create a cool looking hybrid animal. I love the pattern of a zebra and chose to have the head be a lion as the head of a lion has more fierce, unique qualities. Using Google, I discovered a variation of the lion that was absolutely perfect–the wild lion. I decided to place the head of the white lion atop the body of a zebra to create my strong hybrid animal.

Creating the Hybrid Animal
First I saved two images: one of the zebra body I would be using and one of a front-facing white lion head. Using GIMP I opened both files. To prepare the lion head, I created a transparent layer on the image and used the paintbrush tool to paint everything I wanted to exclude in the photo (the lion’s body and the background) so as to isolate the head. I then used the automatic selection tool to select and delete the painted-in black area. Using the eraser tool I erased any black parts left behind, and my lion’s head was ready. I copied the lion head layer onto the zebra image, scaling the head and using the blending tool to make the combination look more natural. After merging the finished layers, I added some black and white text saying “Beware the Wild Zion” to make the hybrid look more fearsome. Below is my finished product!