The First Winner Post and Some Gratitude

Before I start talking about how I made some of my photo shopped pictures, I'd like to give a big "thanks" to everyone who viewed, shared, followed, and commented on my blog! *ahem* Here it goes...

Thank you!!!

Gah, you wouldn't believe how stoked I was when my page views and followers started going up. I'll admit it; I felt a bit like a mini celebrity. ;]

Now, in a previous post, I posted 5 different photo shopped pictures and asked the readers to comment on the one they were most curious to know how was made. Well, seeing as I only had 2 votes and couldn't really declare a winner in that election, I just decided to write about both of the winners. And so, without further ado, so begins eb_fourside's picture pick!


Ok, so I'm REALLY proud of this one. It's nothing majorly special, but I still really liked how it turned out. The first step in creating this picture was to take a picture of my hand holding some pencils.

After taking pictures from a few different angles, I finally had one that I liked. I uploaded the picture to my computer, then opened it up on Photo Impact 8.

Using the Lasso Tool, I traced the entire outline of my hand and the pencils, then right clicked and turned the entire traced image into an object.

The next step was to find a background for the newly created object to rest on. After a bit of searching, I was able to find this nifty little rainbow background.

Still using Photo Impact, I used the Colorize Pen to turn some of the rainbow color into dull gray. To do that and get the effect that the gray was actually getting colored out, I used my Bamboo Tablet to color in the area I wanted gray, making sure to leave the right edge rough.

After I had the backdrop completed, I placed the image of my hand onto it. Before I could merge the images together, I needed something to complete the picture, and that thing was a shadow.

I've been told that I'm big on shadows and I pay loads of attention to lighting. Well, the people who said that were absolutely right! I use shadows a LOT. They really do complete the picture most of the time.

Anyways, to create a shadow, I made a copy of the hand image/object, then placed it on the rainbow background. After turning it black, making it transparent, and then softening up the edges with Soft Edge, I used the Transform Tool to move the shadow around and to make the shadow more realistic.

After a bit of touching up, I finally completed the image! The whole thing probably took about an hour to do, not including photo taking time.