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For end the year I'll be home in VA doing another Album Release for my solo project "Honesty Of The Heart", but this time I'll be accompanied by my boy The SMS (Single Mind Solider). We thought it'd be cool to do a dual release as he'll be re-releasing his project "A Million Birds One Stone". If you're in the area you should come out :). Here's the flyer artwork.

If you want to check out the footage from my first album release held in Kissimmee, FL your can see it here on Vimeo

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Got a chance to do some shooting today and was pretty satisfied with the result. My initial idea was to have myself come out of the box as it sat on top of my glass dining room table. I abandoned that idea and took this challenge instead. Gotta think outside the box :)

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I always enjoy when people share their processes and techniques of how they create their art, so I thought I'd do the same with this particular entry. Lately I've been trying to sharpen my retouching skills, mainly on enhancing and understanding lighting. And this piece was a product of that experimentation. 

With this piece I started out with shooting a couple headshots of myself. I actually shot this in my gargage and the only light I used was the gargage light and natural light from outside as a fill. I took my favorite into Photoshop and masked myself out of the background using the pen tool (layer masking is your best-friend, get to know it). From there I did some quick facial retouching to smoothen my skin some (I needed a haircut :)), then used a soft brush to paint some shadows.

Next, I opened up the histogram played around with the Levels, then gave it a color treatment just to add a little more drama to the photograph. After that I began to paint over the photo with the brush tool to deepen the shadows and bring out the highlights more.

Now this is the point where I just began to experiment conceptually, playing with whatever ideas came to mind. I first started painting various shades of white and gray over my eyes (the whole time I was doing this, I couldn't help but think about Storm from the X-Men).  Then the idea hit me to put some floating objects in the scene just to give it some depth. I found some feather brushes and manipulated them a bit by blurring them out of focus and painting in shadows on my face and shoulders. Next, I found a stock image of a crown of thorns that worked perfectly with the lighting I had going on in the photo already. Did some masking on that bad boy painted some shadows underneath the crown and wallah! And the cherry on top was the two trails of blood I painted in and altered a bit with Liquify at the last minute.

From the beginning of the shoot to the completion of the all the post work, it took about 5hr to do. Not bad eh? :)

So in a nut shell, thats was my process for this particular piece. I enjoyed the final product, esp. getting the time to just playing around in Photoshop. Hopefully, next time I can get a little more in depth into the post-process. Until then, be blessed!

Check out the alternate version on My Flickr Page!

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Sorry for those who've been keeping up with the blog. I've been having some technical difficulties. Never the less I'm starting fresh with a piece I did over the weekend. Enjoy!

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