My theme for this assignment is “The Last Samurai in Christmas”.
The reasons of why I chose it are:
Not many people in the world would ever think of putting a real samurai in a winter environment during Merry Christmas event, because I found out from the net that there are not much of them using this kind of theme. Therefore, it makes my theme sounds unique.
Singapore is a country with no seasons in every year. Either raining or hot and sunny, you will not able to see it snow naturally, except the man-made ones. Therefore, I chose winter as the mode of the theme to imagine that Singapore may snow one day.
I use my father as the main character of the theme (the samurai who is holding a blade in the foreground of the picture) because he has dark skin, old and mature; and has a ‘good’ body.
2. Photoshop skills that are used in creating the theme
The skills and tools that are used in the picture:
Starting from the background, the clouds and skies was taken using a digital camera (personal). I transformed its size that can totally fit in to the whole picture. Then I used brush tools – snowflakes and duplicated 2 layers to make the picture more colorful and nice.
For the mid-ground, the candy houses and the Christmas trees were taken at the entrance of Lot1 shopping center near the bus-stop. In the photoshop, I used quick tool selection to cut the picture from the source; used the dodge tool to make the bricks of the house to brighter colours; used the burn tool to make the inner curve bricks of the house darker and re-size it until they fitted into the picture. I also duplicated 2 layers for the Christmas trees to hold the standing background for the candy house.
For the foreground, I focused a lot of layers for the main character. I took the picture of my father holding my samurai umbrella (bought in Jurong West Shopping Centre) in a stance of defensive mode with upper body topless. I used the burn tool to make my father to look darker and even colour his hair from white to black.
The broadsword was taken at a shop in Orchard underground selling all kinds of weapon display and I told the owner to let me pictured one of their products. I used the pen tool selection to cut out the blade and replaced it onto the umbrella portion. In addition, I used the brushes to help decorating the blade so that the blade will be able to show a snowy smoke aura effect.
For the bracer accessory and the hat, I used the 3D objects that are already in the Photoshop tools, apart from the source folder. Lastly, I used the text tool to apply for the theme title and customize it until it looked like it was been slipped into the blade.
3. Obstacles that I faced when creating my collage
The difficulties that I faced during the process of my montage:
Colour -> I found it difficult when matching the colours with different kinds of designs for each layer of the picture.
Not-related pictures -> Sometimes, the pictures that I shot may not be able to fit into my theme and thus wasting my time and brain juice to think of suitable pictures. This is because some pictures can only be taken in special locations that people in Singapore hardly know.
Limited Photoshop skills -> Apart from the skills that are taught by Mr Bradley, I know nothing of other techniques and tools. Combining the pictures together was easy, but the designing of it was the most difficult for me as I am not good at it.
All the photo that I took in order to combine them into a collage !!
This is the collage that i made myself using Photoshop last year.
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