Graffiti on the Street
The inspiration for this image was the bicycle shop. Fabber cyclery on First St. near downtown San Jose was someplace I passed on the way home from work many times. It has a large Schwinn sign panted on the side and I always thought it would be neat to get a picture with my car in front of it.
This assignment came up and I decided now is as good a time as any.
This was shot on First Street near downtown San Jose at Sunset. One of the first things to do was clean up the side of the car through the doors. For this I used the pen tool and drew in the contoured reflection based on what I remember it looking like.
Next the sign and wires were removed using the Content Aware fill.
Then the back wall was whitewashed to make the canvas.
The HyperSprite lettering was done in Impact font and then converted to a path and stylized using the anchor points and direct selection tool. They were then seprated out to their own layers so the drop shadow effect would work properly.
The Mini in the lower corner is the same image that resides on this site at the top of the classic mini section. I used threshold to reduce black and white. Created a selection based on that painted it in.
The Yosemite Valley and Cat were drawn by hand with the aid of images while the guitar and names on the left were freehand.
Lastly, I copy merged and pasted to a new layer, flipped it vertically and transformed it to fit the contour of the window. I then made a mask to exclude the rest and that’s about it.
The Painterly Picture
One thing I like about class is assignments to do things that I normally would not do. I have considered painting one of my photographs before but never taken the time to sit down with the brush tools and try it.
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- I took this photo under a flood lamp in the front yard using a high iso value. The high iso value actually helped in painting because of the noise that resulted was easy to see while I painted but had no effect on the outcome.
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- I then painted the watering can on its own layer using the sample all layers option on the brush and making sure it had clean edges, clean for a brush anyway. I did the water spout holes on another layer by adding dabs of paint, then selecting them and painting them with the highlights individually. I tend to use a lot of layers figuring it is easy to flatten later if needed.
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- I made copy of the background, made a selection of the painted can layer and used Content Aware Fill (press Shift + F5, then for the “Contents Use” drop down and select Content Aware Fill) to remove the can from the background copy. This way I could paint through things like the handle with continuous strokes without contaminating the background with color foreground color.
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- Of course all of this painting was done on another layer entirely with the can layer turned off (well it was on for one edge until I realized what was going on underneath it). Sample all layers means sample all “visible” layers so turning off layers with colors you don’t want will keep them out of the mix. Another trick learned while doing the flowers was to paint in the dark colors and then come back and do the highlights.
