Thumbnails

So having spent the last three weeks doing Going Live, I find out that we have to do a presentation on our personal project tomorrow.  Time to magic some work out of thin air…

As if they heard me, Digital Tutors has provided me with a way to do exactly that… well, almost.  Creative Environment Thumbnail Techniques in Photoshop with Nate Hallinan (check out his work, by the way: http://www.natehallinan.com/) explains a way to get the composition, colour and lighting of your piece locked down in precisely 45 minutes (or less, if you’re more experienced in Photoshop than I).

Following the tutorial, I started with a study.  The only problem is that there are no real-world photographs of the inside of a cell (unless you count murky black-and-white microscope slides), so I was going to have to make it up a bit.  I decided that considering how much stuff floats around in cells, an underwater scene would a be a good starting point.

I may have shot myself in the foot by picking something that was really rather difficult, and as you can see I ran out of patience toward the bottom of the image, which is not really what you want when you’re trying to keep things fresh. I didn’t time myself for this one or the inside-the-nucleus shot, as it had been so long since I’d touched Photoshop that I needed time to re-familiarise myself with the tools.  I limited myself to 45 minutes for the cytoplasm shot though, and I noticed a big difference in that I felt much more creative and less fed up with the painting.

I used what I had learned from making the study to paint the images on the left, then used Hue/Saturation to alter the colours and make a couple more tests.  I think my favourite one is Test_02, considering that the setting is the interior of a skin cell I think it makes sense to stick to warm colours.