Photo Collage - Roughs

For this project we only had to choose two concept ideas to work with, in this case I worked with the design incorporating victims into the mushroom cloud, and the Truman design. I think they both showed promise, but as with the postcard project, finding images was a problem.

For my design to work I needed to find both a high resolution image of the mushroom cloud from the bombing of Hiroshima and pictures of victims. It took me a while, but I finally found a picture of the cloud that was fairly large, and I also stumbled across a website that had numerous pictures of victims, though some of them were too grainy or small for use. I opened the cloud file in Photoshop and began working with incorporating the other images. My initial trouble was with finding a way that I could blend the picture into the background rather than just slapping one picture on top of another. I finally found that by using the eraser at various opacities gave me the effect I was looking for. I also used the smudge and blur tools on the edges of the pictures. During our critique I received numerous different opinions. For the most part people liked the subtlety of the design. The biggest problem was the image in the upper left hand corner. I had placed it there in an effort to combat the negative space, and give the piece a stronger sense of balance, but it stuck out like a sore thumb.

The Truman design was a harder problem to work out. First of all, I couldn't find very big images at all. Placing Truman over the background of Hiroshima was obviously not that big of a problem, and I was glad to see that he blended well with the values of the background. I had worried that it would be much darker or the light source would be coming from the wrong direction. My biggest problem was the newspaper. I had previously found a picture of a newspaper from the end of the war (seen here), that I wanted to twist and put in Truman's hands but I couldn't find a good way to pull it off. So I decided to blot out the "Dewey Defeats Truman" on the original and then just put the headline of "Peace". To do this I just took the Eyedropper tool and grabbed the color closest to the letter, painted it out, then blurred it all together. Then I imported the newspaper image, and made pen tool objects out of the letters. From there it was only a matter of rotating and placing. This design wasn't as popular as my first. Many people thought the headline stood out as having just been placed on top of everything.


Time to work on the mushroom cloud design then.