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To begin the caterpillar picture, I made the
background. To do this, I started with a
picture of a glowing mushroom
farm (the light blue green mushrooms in the upper right corner). There
was a monster in the background of the picture (where the tall trees
are) that I did not want to be in my final composition, so I removed him
from the picture using the clone stamp. I then made a duplicate copy of
the layer (which was originally the first 325 pixels wide by 275 tall)
and flipped it horizontally to make a symmetrical mountain background. I
then used the clone and pattern stamps to extend the background down to
600 pixels in a texturized version of the dark green background color.
I then searched the web for other glowing
mushrooms that would fit the overall feel of the picture. The
orange
mushroom was in a fully blacklit garden, so I used the lasso tool to
remove the mushroom from the rest of the picture and resized it to fit.
I decided I wanted a focal point in the back of the picture to smooth
out the "flipped" background layers, so I found the
glowing blue
mushroom and shrank it down to make it look like a mushroom tree off in
the distance. I used a lasso to cut the
red mushroom out of the picture
it was in and pasted it in to the picture three times, shrinking the
image down the further into the background it went in order to show
perspective. After all of the mushrooms were in the picture, I adjusted
their color levels using the levels, color balance, hue/saturation, and
brightness/contrast tools so that they all fit within the same picture.
The most important part of these steps was figuring out which mushrooms
to use in the picture and where they should go in the layout to show the
garden without it being overpowering.
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The idea for doing a day-glow mushroom garden
came to me when I saw a picture of a
beautiful green mushroom with light
pouring out from it, so I knew that would be the mushroom in the
foreground that the caterpillar was sitting on. I tried many different
things (from pictures of real glow worms to trying to make an
anthropomorphic caterpillar using bug and human parts together), but I
eventually found an artist’s drawing of a
blue caterpillar that I
thought fit perfectly with the picture. I put both on the foreground,
scaling and rotating until they fit with each other and the rest of the
picture. I adjusted the color balance on the caterpillar to make him
more "glowing".
For the hookah, I wanted to find something red
to bring in more warm colors as I felt the picture was getting too full
of blues and greens. I found a
hookah that was similar to what I wanted,
but the cord was not long enough and the part you inhale from was on the
ground. Therefore I cut the hookah apart into many layers (which I later
merged), extended the cable using the clone tool, and moved and rotated
the end of the hookah so it would fit in the caterpillar’s arms. I also
brightened the hookah using the color balance tool to make it look like
it was glowing. I did not like that the hookah was on top of the
caterpillar’s hands, so to make him "hold" the hookah I copied his
hands, pasted them into a new layer, and put that layer on top of the
hookah.
The smoke letters were done using a plain
white font. I used the "create warped text" tool to make the letters on
a wavy path. I used the ripple and Gaussian blur filters several times
until I was happy with the smoky result. On a separate layer, I made
three ovals of increasing size using the oval marquis and then repeated
the steps above to make it look like all one breath of smoke.
For Alice, I found a picture of a
girl looking
up with her arms folded on a pillow. I decided the image would work well
if I put Alice on a mushroom instead, so I cut the pillow out of the
picture and found
another mushroom, and used the scale and rotate tools
to make Alice rest correctly on the mushroom. (This was done on a
separate image). I then pasted it in to the picture as all one layer,
and adjusted the colors to make both the mushroom and Alice brighter. It
did not feel like the caterpillar was looking at Alice, so I cut his eye
out, made it a new layer, flipped it horizontally and adjusted its
angle. I also moved the caterpillar back a little bit on the mushroom
and Alice down further in the picture to make the angles of their eyes
match better.
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