Here is an image from my InDesign tutorial of How to Hide the Body. I started out with hand-drawn ink images that I scanned into photoshop. I added wrinkled paper textured by downloading several wrinkling brushes and also downloaded multiple blood brushes to assimilate blood splatters. This tutorial gives options to disposing a dead body whether it be underground, in your home, under cement or in outer space. I imported different text from online to give an eerie typography feel to the book. Due to printing problems, I was never actually able to bind the pages but I constructed a black, textured hardcover with gold, spray painted insides and shadows of a skull and mug shots. The book was loosely held together by a think black, leather belt. I went through a lot of ideas before I came to an instructional about corpses. These included: how to throw a party for a hamster and also how to write and instructional manual. Overall, I was pretty satisfied with my final result and was even more happy that I got to use my own drawings.
Here is my final image for the reconstructed contextualized project. I used multiple images for this project, all that I took on my own. The dwarf hamster on the left is my pet/roommate Carlos. I tricked him into eating from his bowl to get him in a stand up position. A lot of masking went into this little guy. I used a hair-like brush to work on the edges and add definition to the fur. I also used small brushed to recreate whiskers since his got cropped out. I also used a desaturated, low opacity copy of the little guy for the shadow. Next to Carlos is an image of Carlos' transportation orb. He rides this thing all over place but after much use there is tons of writing and duct tape all over it. I had to use several effect to bring out highlights in the plastic and to also give it a translucent effect revealing the background. Most of the lines on the ball are drawn in to show light contrast. The trees and pathway came from a very "yellow" picture that I took from TCNJ's campus. I used multiple photo filters to manipulate the completely yellow-green trees into a warmer, fall atmosphere. The cyborg coming from the trees is a combination of my neck and a outdoor parking garage sensor light. I used motion blurs and different gradients to synthesize a metal texture. Lastly, is a cropped image of Loser Hall that proves to be a barrier/destination for adventurous Carlos. There are many similar hues throughout the picture and that is because I felt having comparing photo filters would tie the picture together more and give it a more realistic feeling. The hardest part of this project was making the cyborg appear as if it was coming out of leaves. I used different leaf brushes and cloning stamp tools to make it look as natural as possible.
