Frankenstein Animalia

Here it is! The first brief of the year. We will be having five mini briefs, each of them giving us one work that we will have to draw inspiration from to do a mini project. For one of the five mini-briefs we had to do for this module, we had to use the word Frankenstein.

As most know, Frankenstein was a monster stitched together by using several different parts of different humans into one. With this in mind, I thought of doing it with animals. Mixing several of them together to form a different one. The plan was to mix both photo manipulation and illustration to do this, while finding a way to blend the two.

To start with, I had to decide which animals I wanted to make a mixture of. To do this, I actually decided to ask on social media what animals’ people would like to see mixed in one.

Some of the answers were:

- Giraffe and Lion

- Elephant and Crocodile

- Fox and Swan

- Turtle and Seal

Obviously, I do not have access to pictures of these animals, however I did find a royalty free website where I could browse through pictures and download them in exceptionally good quality. For my work, I always make sure to use pictures that do not infringe any copyright laws.

The next step was to figure out how I was going to blend the background and real-life images. Because I had previous experience with this one Photoshop plug-in called Topaz Labs, I decided that I could achieve the same feel and texture in both my illustrated backgrounds and the blended in animals.

The process of blending the animals was, bizarre, to say the least. It is hard to figure out how it will look like in the end, specially before all the details are cropped and blended in together. I had to find images that somehow match each other in terms of position, obviously knowing I can alter these slighting using the warp and perspective tools on Photoshop. I also had to make sure to colour match the images. Whether that be the colour of a certain animal into the other, or even the texture of their skin… or fur… or feathers.

In the end, I was quite pleased with the result. It was a really fun project to work in. The backgrounds I tried to somewhat match where, well, one of the animals of the mixture would live in. When it came to the blending, I do believe that it blended quite well, Topaz Clean managed to make the images of the animals look almost completely illustrated which was very interesting to me how much power certain tools can have. I also applied this tool onto the illustrated background to ensure continuity.