In-Depth Ambitious project #2: Propaganda
Esentially, the reason I decided to choose myself for this project was so that I could have more control/freedom with the expressions I could use.
Once I decided that, I thought about some things people used to say about me to tease me. One of the things people used to say is that sometimes I can end up thinking "too" logically about things and that I could sometimes be robotic about how I approach things. I figure that would be a perfect way to stand against me in propaganda.
So I decided to double down and exaggerate that sentiment ten-fold, emphasizing the cold nature of robots and by extention me. The image below was the picture my desktop background was at and I really wanted to use a palette similar to that one to depict the "cold" aspect, so I took it to a website that can generate palettes off pictures and used it to get the palette for my design.
Once I got that out of the way, I took a bunch of photos in varying positions with both "selfie style" qualities and blank/slightly aggressive expression to convey the idea of the "happy and warm" portrait being a facade for the cold unfeeling robot. The two below were the winners.
(reason I took the photo in the dark was so that as I didn't want to lose the mood of the photo while I was working on it)
Next up was the actual drawing. Using the dark picture as a reference, I began drawing the "skeleton" of the figure, placing the metal plates, and finalizing the linework using selection strokes to make the lines as inorganic as possible.
(The lines of the body trail off the edges of the canvas)
(In the last image I felt as if the image was too centered and didn't leave enough space for the lightsource I had in mind, so I repositioned it closer to the bottom.)
Next up are the colors. Setting a layer behind the linework, I colored in the image with "Slate Grey"as the neutral, as well as setting up black background and the highlights for a low-light and especially dark setting. That being said I couldn't find any decent backlit figures in low light evironments that fit what I wanted, so I just decided to work off what I understood about how light hits an object.
(I knew I wanted the bright red eyes to contrast with the overal dark image , but didn't know how to get the glow effect I wanted, so I looked up some quick basic tutorials on how to achieve the glassy-glowy look)
Once the highlights and eye lighting were in their spots, the shadows and textures were next. To do this, I set another fully black layer on top of the image and used a low opacity eraser to carve out the figure from it. Once I had the general form, I turned the black layer all the way back up and kept going with the low-opacity eraser and smudge tool to try and both carve out the light and proper gradients/values, but also to give the metal a better texture.
Photoshop Elements is very limited in it's tools so I tried to make do with what I had.
Once that was finished, all that was left was to add the color to the silicon cheeks (to simulate my chubby cheeks) and add the other elements of the image including the glowing picture frame as the lightsource, the text, and question marks to draw the eye around a way that didn't clutter the image too much.
(This is the original 18"x24" jpeg file used to print)
As far as hiccups I encountered along the way goes, one of them was the way I executed the text. I knew I wanted it to be vague, but I also wanted to keep the amount of clutter in the negative space to a minimum because I believed it would get too noisey and detract from the large and imposing robot me. The conclusion I came to was adding the red question marks and have the word Empathy to suggest that I, the robot, do not understand empathy.
The second hiccup I had was not being sure how to make this robot look more like me, which I got hard-stuck on. One idea that came to mind after critique was to make the frame a warning sign saying "This JD-01 unit is loose: Danger!" and have the JD-01 label on theforehead somewhere to better relate the two together.
Don had the idea after critique to draw the mustache...
Anyway, The final hiccup was honestly the most damning one for me and that was the printing. Unfortunately when I took it to the Kinkos in my local FedEx, It turned out the image was too dark for their printer and ended up losing almost all the detail that went into the piece. They suggested I should turn it into CMYK and that's the version I had to bring. (the file and final, mounted result shown below). In that regard I should've done a test print before taking it anywhere and then giving it more contrast or build up the values more or something.
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