To begin, I took the original photo of the bathroom that I had taken and put it as the first layer on Photoshop. The color was not appealing to me and would not match up with what I wanted my final product to look like, so I began to play with the color balance option and I ended up with a room that reminded me somewhat of a sunset. The walls and floor were a cold, almost purple blue tint while the wall was still a yellow that faded down to blueish, albeit cold yellow. The brown and yellow tones disappeared and that's exactly what I had wanted it to do, so I continued by beginning to use the quick select tool and crop out myself from the aforementioned first chosen portrait. I had also cut out myself from the second portrait, just to explore and make sure that was certainly not the one that I wanted to use. After I had added that, I thought about how I really wanted to present myself in the photo since I was going to cover my face and eliminate the facial expression anyway. I thought about what I was attempting to demonstrate with my piece, and I related myself back to how I felt in the beginning and what exactly I was trying to get across. I felt like a statue, frozen in time - and that's what I wanted to make myself look like. I utilized the black and white option and created a clipping mask so the edit only affected the specific layer where my body was. I also experimented with the dodge tool to make my hair seem less greasy and fresher. The black and white supplemented the contrast I had wanted to develop. Finally, the last thing I had to get done was to edit my face into a tiger. I had found a picture of a tiger online that really fit what I wanted and it was in the public domain so I put it onto my collage. I used the eraser tool at 10% opacity around the edges near the left side of my face and my neck to give the illusion of blending.
ReflectionAll in all I think my collage was a success. Simply observing it does exactly what I wanted it to do; it gives me closure. It gives me confidence. The whole process went almost seamlessly, and although there were some problems with my system I was able to identify problems such as not knowing how to apply filters to one single layer and overcome them quickly.
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