Contest Research

I have found a really good website that post's contests all the time. The website is 'Worth1000.com'. Also you can view all the contests that have been and gone also with all the images that were entered into that category. 

Here is an example of a contest and its requirements:

This is a website i've found which posts regular photoshop contests which i had to sign up to, to then be able to take part in there contests. 

This image shows one of the contests i've chosen to enter. The theme is 'complex street light'. On the right it shows where you can download the source image, but i cant see where it says anything about what your allowed to do to it, from other peoples uploads it looks like you can do anything to this image. There is 2 days left to get your images posted on the contest before the votes.

The Source image

Final outcome

Here is my final outcome to what i did to the image i had to use. Took me roughly an hour and half to do.

as you can see here on the part iv drawn in red, it shows how many views i have had and how many votes i've had by people. My image has only been on there website for about 8 hours.

Here is another contest I've entered, below is the source image and what I have done with it:

Here you can see my image uploaded onto the website, on the right you can see how many votes I've got and how many views.

Original

Image I entered to a contest: Theme was shatter.

This is the original Image:

 This is the image I entered to a contest:

This image surprisingly took a long time to create. Unfortunatly I dont have the original image, but it was basically a picture of a swimmer jumping into a river. I thought I would try to make it look like a sort of fantasy heaven type thing. So what I did was, took a couple photos of clouds off the internet and made the background, but changed the colour of it making it look fantasy. Then I put the image of the girl in, but to make her look like a fairy I had to get some wings from another fairy image on the internet and stick them on her and make them look right. Using some transform tools like warp, skew etc. Then I decided to change her cloths since a swim suit didnt really look the part. This was quite a long process since I had to find the right cloths and at the right angle, I then cut it out with the pen tool and stuck it on her. Then changed the colour of it. The same process sort of went with the hair, I had to find the right image and angle, I then cut it out, and pasted it a few times onto her since it wasnt quite the right angle. But I used the clone stamp several times to make it look right. Then I changed the colour of all the cloths and then put a glow and refelction on the clouds underneath her.

I wasnt that fond of this image and wasnt sure whether to include it in my work, I just dont think it looks very good/right.

cracked text

 Here I was applying bevel and emboss to make it look 3d and a little like metal.

 Here I used the polygonal lasso tool to select areas and move them around to make it look like cracked glass.

 Then on a new layer I used to lasso tool to make a circle in the centre of the text. Then went into filter-render-clouds which then made it look like this. After, I went into filter-blur-radial blur.

 Then to give it colour I clicked on the cloud layer, then clicked on the half circle at the bottom and chose hue and saturation then made sure colourise was checked.

Then that allowed me to change the colour of the smoke by moving a slider left and right. Then I clicked on FX at the bottom of the layers pallet and applied 'stroke'.

Image Manipulation

This is an image I created in photoshop. First of all, we created the text using a website called 'wordle' then saved the image into the desktop. Then opened the image in photoshop and made three layers with different styles of the text on them. Then we grabbed the 'text' tool and wrote something in the centre of all the letters with a different colour that stands out. Once that was done we selected each of the layers and turned them 3D and adding blur to different layers.



Simone Legno

Im surprised that someone who is Italian can produce something, that if you look at it, would think someone Japanese would have made it. I think his work is clever and rather interesting, but i'm not a fan of of this kind of style.
I think the randomness of his work is what makes it look so interesting. Like, the milk bottle of the right image, it has legs and horns and the pattern on the carton is of someones face. I think the use of the cartoon's and the block colour with outlines make it look a lot like the Japanese style.


Artist Research


Daarken




I have chosen this artist because I've only just found out about him literally last night when I was on youtube looking at some concept work tutorials. I thought his work was very impressive, and I really liked his tutorials and thought he did a really good job on them. So, I then took a look at his website which aswell was very impressive, all of his work is excellent. I really like this images he did of people's faces because although they looked so well detailed, when you actually looked at them closely there isnt a lot of detail that went into it. But I really dont see why it looked so real, maybe because it looked like a painting. Below is a link to his work:
http://daarken.com/digitalfineart.html

I really liked a lot of his concept work as well, maybe because he's done work for blizzard and I'm quite fond of there style. But, I was really amazed by some of the paintings, its amazing how someone can come up with such things from there mind.

Heres an image I really liked because, I dont know why, but, it looks really I think. I'm not sure what it is. Your eyes get dragged straight onto those eyes in the centre. But as you can see with this image all the detail is in the eyes then as you get further out into the photo the detail is a lot less, if you look at the eyes then at the shoulders you can see what I mean. But I think this gives a really good effect. 

Here is one of his concept pieces. I think this is one of my favourite ones because the amount of detail in the image is incredible for someone just to think of; so much is going on in the image. As you can see, there is a good and evil side, you can identify this by looking at the right side, there is a lot of orange and dark colours, and by the creatures. On the left the colours are dull but not so much orange so this doesn't indicate the dark and evil side, also the guy flying on the eagle creature represents a good side. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8tn6oMcr3Q&list=FLllkov6ahM4hpNkoUa38qxw&feature=mh_lolz Here is a link to one of his concept tutorials.

Below is an email I sent to this artis asking for a tip on something

The problem you are having is very common and pretty much everyone goes through it, I know I did. Your problem is that you don't have a good enough "mental library" to pull from. Drawing from reference is easy, but trying to remember what a person should look like is the challenge. The only thing you can do is practice. Draw a lot from life, and then do it over and over. It can take years before you can successfully paint from your imagination. 

Mike "Daarken" Lim
571.244.8931
www.daarken.com

-------Original Message------- From: William Roberts  To: daarkenart@daarken.com Subject: (none) Sent: Dec 10 '11 1:37pm Hi my names will, I've recently found you time lapse video of a liche priest on youtube, then after watching checked out your website. your art work is just incredible can I say!. I was just wondering if you can help me with something.  I've been drawing digitally for about year and a half now and have a pretty good understanding of photoshop, I'm also doing a course involving digital art and photoshop at plymouth college of art. The thing I need help with is, I'm pretty good at drawing from a source image, but have real trouble trying to do a concept, like a character for example. I can think of an idea in my head for what to paint, but cant get it too look right when I try and do it, do you have any tips that would help me?  Will

Nico Di Mattia

Ive chosen nico beacause I think his work it very detailed and I like his style. He is probably the reason I started getting into digital art because it was his work and time lapsed speed paintings on youtube that inspired me to try out digital art.

Nico is from Argentina and currently works on his own comic book and illustrators magazine, but also works as freelance and charicaturist for different buissness companies.

Here is an example of work he did for pixar during the release of toy story 3, link for speedpainting below: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eg5kQcUIaG0 

Link to speedpainting: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssOJQXdwmrI&feature=related

It was this image/speed painting that inspired me to start digital art, it just amazed me how someone actually drew this on a computer and to such detail, I think thats what wanted me to start this kind of thing. I think the detail in the hair is incredable, you can see each strand. Also he has got the shadow and lighting perfect. Nico is deffinatly one of my top favourite artists.

Christophe Huet

I really like this image, it is a really good way to advertise whatever the the drink is because it is showing that everything is melting because of the heat. By placing the bottle in the centre it makes it the centre of the image, It makes the drink look like it is a nice refreshing drink. 

 I think the way the artist has made everything melt is very clever, I'm not sure how you would do this, I'm guessing by using layer masks, liquify tool, or maybe using the brush tool with a custom brush.

I think his work is really interesting and strange, but in a good way. If you look at his work a lot of it, is really weird and random things. I think thats what makes his work rather interesting and clever.

http://www.christophehuet.com/ link to his website.