20% Time 3/9/08

This week I decided to try out another competition at photoshop talent (it is only my second one).  When I got there, I had to chose from the multiple contests that were active this particular week.  I decided to choose a themed contest from the ‘all levels’ catagory called food landscapes.  ’All levels’ simplymeans that anyone belonging to the site, whether new (like me) or an old pro, can participate.  A themed contest means that the site supplies some pictures, you can use some of your own too, and you must create a new picture out of the original ones that pertains to the goal provided for that particular contest (and follow the rules or face the consequenses of a low score!). 

This particular one asked for a landscape made entirely out of food, and the prize was filter forge-a plugin for photoshop that allows the user to create their own filters, and acsess to the filters of other users as well.  I just could not resist.

So,  I downloaded all the fruit pictures that they provided and went to work scaling them down, and editing out the parts that I could potentially want from each picture.  After I did all that work , I deleted any layers that I realized could not be worked into my end result.  I ended up keeping a grape, a peach, a banana peel, a kiwi slice, a watermelon, a pinapple, and raspberries.  The site always uses massively high resolution for their pictures, and these pictures here are much smaller than the ones that I used.  What do you think I could do with them?  I did not even know yet.

So I went to flickr cc to randomly look for pictures that I could download for my picture to push my ideas toward some kind of unification.  Then I found the soup.  It was a french onion soup that had a lot of substance and color to it.  I finally had my base. 

 cc “French Onion Soup” by ilmingo

I decided to do a beach theme, with a little house inspired by another entry that I saw that used crackers and chocolate to create a really awesome little home.  The only difference was that I did not have a lot of time to go and create a ton of detail, so a got a ‘pre-made’ gingerbread house.

  cc “Gingerbread House” by flyingpurplemonkey

I began by taking the soup out of it’s bowl and copying it several times over to create a solid bottom to my picture that had a natural, sand and rocks feel to it.  I added a gradient background of different shades of blue to be the sky.  I cut out the house and placed it into the corner and added a shadow.  I then took the kiwi and turned it yellow and placed it at the top to be the sun.  I took one raspberry and changed it white, duplicated it and arranged them to serve as clouds.  Next, I noticede that the banana peel had ridges in it and could look like wood if worked with, so a took off one side of the peel and duplicatd it a couple times, made a little chair and “painted” it a green color.  Finally, I took one grape and colored the entire grape orange.  Then took two of the ‘panels’ of the fruit and colored each one different, one purple and one green to make a beach ball.

It was at this point that I realized that my picture looked empty.  All the other ones had crammed all kinds of stuff into theirs, so I wanted to include some more pictures.  I resized the picture to be longer (just by a little) and cut off part of the floor layer to make room for water.

 cc “wham:a different corner” by

From there, I created an island out of a watermelon out in the middle of the sea.  Then I took the peach, sut it into half along the natural indentation on the fruit, and stretched each side into a different shape and arranged them to look like palm branches.  My last picture used was a pinapple that I just stretched out to make a trunk.  It was here that because of my time limit ( I would be late if I waited until the next day and it was already late at night) I did not try to do it the ‘right way’ and use the pinnaple as a pattern and fill a predrawn vector (a shape) and fill it with the pattern.  I totally spaced out how to do that, I will have to find it again.  My last step was just going back and using the burn tool to get all the areas that needed any shading.  And then I was done.

I ranked 33 out of 34. (I will find out by Monday.)