08.11.13 Dia De Obon

::Before and After::
This week I'm bringing you a photo from our series "Dia De Obon".  It was inspired by Julia Kuzmenko McKim's Sugar Skull series.  You can see hers on her site.

In the Japanese tradition of Obon families gather at cemetery and prepare the graves.  During Obon season the dead can go home to visit their houses.  So families prepare the grave sites and clean them up for their families return.  During Obon they prepare an eggplant as a horse by putting sticks in it to represent four legs.  The dead person uses this eggplant horse to ride to the families house.  The family takes the eggplant home and then will later return it to the grave so that the dead can return to their resting place.
On the Mexican holiday "Dia De Los Muertos" families go to the grave yards and decorate tombstones with deceased family members' favorite foods and candies.  This is done in order to encourage them to return where they can spend time with family and hear prayers that will be taken back to heaven with them.
There are a few similarities with these holidays that we wanted to explore, so we decided to merge them for this art piece.

Let's take a look at the images.

Before

First thing I did on this image was smooth out the colors and add some accessories. I also modified the face shape on my model.

Modified face shape, and smoothed skin

My next step was dodging and burning.

With dodging and burning

My final step was to add some color variations.

Final Image

So that was everything.

Before and After

See the entire series at FANTiM.COM

02.16.13 Leaves

::Before And After::

This week's photo idea came to me one night as I was falling asleep.  I had an image slip into my head.  Dressed in a business suit, floating through the clouds, buildings rising from below.  It was a very peaceful dream, the kind of feeling you get right before you start dreaming.

I woke up and decided to create what I saw.  It's not exactly as I saw it in my dream because I would've needed to rent a hot air balloon to get the angle on the buildings that would've been needed.

I decided to include a before and after of this week's photo.

Completed Image

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Main Building Used

Composed Buildings

Extended Buildings

Falling Man

For the falling man I modeled myself.  We used the umbrellas and windows to create the light coming from in front of me.  We also used the lights in my apartment to guarantee that my back wouldn't be too washed out.  We tried using a fan at first to create the shirt flapping, but it wasn't strong enough so we ended up using string and photoshopping it out later.

Finished Composition
Before Crop and Color Removal

Final Image

Zoomed In For Detail

So something interesting about working on this composition.  During the time of this photo Japan and Russia are feuding over a few islands in Norther Japan.  There was originally a sign on the building saying that once Japan reacquired these islands Japan would have peace.  We decided to replace this with a custom haiku Risa Takeuchi wrote just for this photo.

舞い落ちる

木の葉は行く先

告げぬまま

-梨紗

Roughly translating to: Fluttering leaves don't tell me where they're going.