22/52 - Back to the drawing board

This last week, I was finally able to put together a picture that I've been wanting to do for a while now.

My Brother-In-Law, Chad, has been living with us for the last month as he's been transitioning from moving out of Illinois to figuring out what he wants to do.  He just accepted a job as a camp counselor in the mountains around Asheville, NC and moved out this week.  So, the last night before he left, I figured I needed to get this shot done or the opportunity would pass me by.

Chad is an artist and Art, or Sketch Art (or something like that), is one of the majors that he got from Northern Illinois University.  So, I wanted to do a picture that showcased one of his drawings along with him actually drawing.  I wanted it to show his creativity coming to life or something like that.  I had a rough idea of the picture that I wanted to get and a basic idea of how I wanted to do it.  I've tried this technique before (layering multiple images together) but haven't ever done it with this much detail in the image.

So, while he was at work the other day, I got everything set up the way I wanted it and fired off several test shots to make sure I had the lighting the way I wanted and the room set up properly to get the image I was after.  Once he got home, I laid out the idea to him and we went to work.

It really only took about 10 minutes to get the shots that I wanted, so it was a pretty easy shooting process.  The thing that took the most time was the post processing.

I used the shot of Chad sitting at the desk as my 'background' image, the one I'd layer all of the other images on top of.  Then I put the image of him on the right side of the desk on top of that, and erased everything out of the image with the exception of him and his shadow.  Then, I did the same thing with the image of him on the left of the desk.  Then, I took one of his drawings that I got off of his website, Screw'dTopia, and layered that one on top of all of them.  I blended the drawing in so that it would show all of the shadows and subtle lighting changes through, so that it looks like it's actually drawn on the wall, rather than just pasted into the image.  Then, I just had to erase the drawing where it was covering his body.  After that, I did some final processing to the entire image where I enhanced the contrast, adjusted the highlights and shadows and a few other things to make it look more gritty and slightly cartoony itself.

Overall, I was extremely happy with the end result.  It came out better than I had it imagined, which is always a fun thing.

Let me know what you think.

T.