Subtitles of the Movie

While we were building this project I am almost 100 percent certain a lot of you were scratching your heads going, what in the world is this guy doing? Well, when you're doing something like this you have to have something in your mind as to what the end result could possibly be. It's almost like the sculptor who looks at a slab of marble and can get a David out of it. This is not going to be a David but you can kind of look at the shapes that we have here and the textures on here and then, knowing the Filters in Photoshop, you can kind of figure out that by the time this is all finished it's going to look better than this. The goal as an artist is to understand your tools. Now as you see here when I move thing around I have all these parts, but I know that this is not what I would present my client. The client would say to me, "I want you to create something that I could put in a frame that looks like a painting." So I know that all I have to worry about is the shapes. I have to worry about the negative space, the positive space, the composition itself. So having said all that I'm going to go over here and I'm going to choose to Flatten this image. When you Flatten your image all of your Layers are compacted into one. Do not do this if you intend to come back and experiment. So you can always go to Edit, Undo Flatten Image and to be safe you can simply save this as a different version. So, for example, I'll call this still life comp flat so that my other version is still happy. So if I go back to my Finder here and I go to my still life folder you see we have the still life comp and we have a flat version, so this one I can always come back to later on to tweak it if I need to. So on the flat version I'm going to literally flatten this image and it's going to ask me if I want to discard hidden layers. When you don't see an eyeball those Layers are hidden so you can go ahead and get rid of them. And now the fun part. We're going to go to Filter, Artistic and we can choose any of these to experiment. So, it will all open up the same thing anyway, so I'm going to choose Colored Pencil and then I'm going to zoom out a little bit by clicking down here and we can start to experiment with the different effects so we can see what the different ones look like. So this is Cutout, which is kind of interesting. We have a Dry Brush which also looks kind of interesting. Film Grain, Fresco, which looks kind of really cool actually, Neon Glow, Paint Daubs, Palette Knife, Plastic Wrap, Poster Edges, which looks awesome. I really like that one a lot actually. We have Rough Edges, Smudge Stick, which looks cool, Sponge I think looks great and when you choose one, by the way, you can use these sliders to then make it look even better. Now Watercolor looks really cool. Now once again, squint your eyes and imagine this in a frame on a wall. It looks like a painting, OK, so that's the whole goal. We want to take some very angular, very 3D objects that had nothing going for them and then apply something to them and then turn it into a painting. Now, granted, it's digital and that argument is still up in the air. If you create something on the computer is it really art? And this argument has been going for billions of years, since mankind started drawing. I'm pretty sure when they started using the Conte Crayons they had the same fight. That's not really art. If you're not using your fingers to paint, you're not painting. So, this is going to go on forever. So art is art. You start with nothing and you create something. So what we can do, let's say on Sponge, is we can increase the Brush Size to get crazier and crazier detail, or we can go all the way down to have tighter detail. We can also use the Definition Slider to increase the definition or decrease the definition. So you can really just have a lot of fun. You can also increase the smoothness or take all the smoothness off. So, I'm really liking this one quite a lot, actually and look at the grapes. Look how cool they look with that specularity on it. I'm going to say OK and now check it out. What we started out with was something that was pretty ugly. We started out with - let me see if I can find the right one here - this. Yikes! And after a lot of hard work you wind up with something that you could put in a frame, or you can use as a greeting card or a post card, or a gift for someone. So, what you have to do as an artist is see the big picture. Realize that you're starting off with geometric shapes that you're going to add some textures to, tweak the lighting, add some other textures and then the end result is what you're really most interested in.