The Making of a Robot Frog
In this tutorial, I'm basically emphasizing the importance of spending that
extra time in the planning stage of your images - finding the most suitable
source images and even sketching out your basic compositions before the actual
image creation stage.
After all, why create more work for yourself when you
don't need to?
1. So the first step was to prepare my source materials.
First off, I
started with a frog. Any animal will do, but I prefer to stick with animals with
an easily identifiable figure.
Once we go on to cover our figure in metal, we
want the underlying figure to still read clearly regardless of the material he's
contructed from.
Then I went and gathered various chrome, engine, and robotic
parts. While doing this, I kept on the lookout of pieces that had a relatively
similar tone in reflection to them.
Of course, you can always apply the
necessary changes to nonuniform source images, but it's always easier to spend
the time now in the initial source hunt stage instead of trying to fix them all
later. It just makes sense.
2. Okay, so now time to start drawing out a blueprint for our mode of attack
on this image.
Still in the planning stage, I spent a little time sketching
out the basic outline of our image, laying out where I want my segments to
lay.
Knowing where and what shapes I'll need makes the whole process a lot
easier, trust me.
3. So now armed with our ground plan and source images, it's all a matter of
following our outline.
Using the Lasso tool, I roughly selected these areas
and pasted it over my sketched segments.
Then it was all a matter of skewing
the pieces to fit our blueprint as best I could.
And I did this until the figure was covered.
As an aside, I like to start
with the pieces furthest from the camera, then work my way forward as much as I
can.
For the frog's mouth, I needed a wider piece of chrome.
I decided to use
an image of a faucet for this part, since it's a nice longer piece and fit the
shape of the mouth relatively well.
So again, I just extracted the pipe, and
used the Distort tool to form it around the mouth area.
4. There, now we have the frog covered to my liking.
But I noticed a few
remnants of the original background remained on the edges.
No problem, easy
fix.
Using the Clone Stamp Tool, I sampled a clean area of the background
and just painted over our unsightly areas.
5. Now that I'm satisfied with the look of the basic figure, it's time to add
a few shadows to this guy.
I did this by creating new layers sandwiched in
between each of our chrome segment layers.
Then, on these layers, using a
soft black brush, I painted in shadows underneath our chrome segments following
the contours of the pieces directly below.
This should add a little more
depth to the figure and also isolate each of the segments a little
better.
And finally, to further accentuate the shadows, I added a few slight
highlights to the edges of our pieces.
I did this with a small white brush
just painting over our edges and existing highlighted areas.
So you see, just as nearly anything, spending that extra time in the early
preparation stages always saves you time in the long run.
After all, why
create a robot if you won't even have time to enjoy him?
Rib-BOT!
Sources:
Frog and chrome pieces from
http://istockphoto.com
http://www.istockphoto.com/file_closeup.php?id=4366735
http://www.istockphoto.com/file_closeup.php?id=848252
http://www.istockphoto.com/file_closeup.php?id=840495
http://www.istockphoto.com/file_closeup.php?id=262664
Cyborg
and Sink from http:sxc.hu