Story Book

This piece was one of my favorites to do because it taught me a lot about depth perception, something that I have struggled with before. This piece was also challenging because I had to find most of my own stock photos. As I have become more experienced with Photoshop, I like to test myself by finding my own images and seeing if I can use the tutorial as more of a guideline and follow along. This way I can have my own unique end product and work on bettering my artistic eye. When following a tutorial step by step and word for word, I find that I do not really learn anything about art and what looks "good", I am just going through the motions

This is the final product:

After looking back on this project now, having completed many more, I can almost instantly pick out areas that can be improved; however, I'm sure many of you would not pick out the same things!

I started this tutorial by inserting...

...these two pictures.





I transformed the wood picture to fit across the bottom of the canvas, and cropped the sky picture, so I just had clouds filling the top of the canvas. I also needed to darken the wood a bit to match the time of day, which is dusk.

I then worked my way through selecting the book, which can be a somewhat tedious process, but when done well, can look almost flawless. I then laid the book over the wood and worked on projecting a light shadow. The next and most time consuming part was the grass.

As shown in the tutorial, the grass needed to be warped down into the binding of the book, so that it actually looks like an open book. If I had just laid the grass across it, it would not have looked natural. It was difficult to cut the grass so that it perfectly outlined the top of the book. Once all that was done, the fun began. I enjoyed putting in the bench, lamppost, and road because those are the items that give the book the "pop-up" effect. Unfortunately, I cannot find my stock image of the bench, but rest assured, I spent an extremely long time selecting it from its original background.

The road was already mostly set up for me. I just needed to transform it a bit, and it naturally gives this nice illusion of fading off into the distance. When I put the lamppost in, I worked on brightening up the lights a bit so it looked like that it was turned on. I needed to match the shadow of the book to the shadow of the bench and lamppost. I was taught a few good tricks to make good shadows. It looks as though the lamppost is shining onto the bench. I do remember having to really match up the color/shade of the bench to fit in with the scene. I used the burn/dodge tool quite a bit for this project. Overall, I had really looked forward to doing this tutorial, and once I sat down to do it, I could not pull myself away. It was nice medium-length tutorial, and I just thought the concept was very interesting, which is something that I critique heavily when determing if I want to do a tutorial or not.

In case any of you are interested -- Story Book Tutorial