The goal of this project is to create a digital collage using Photoshop. This is not an easy project for me because I am not familiar with the Photoshop in the first place.
Phase 1. Watercolor & Color Pencil
The first part of this project is to draw a watercolor hand and a color pencil object. I wanted to choose Oasis’s song Alcohol and Cigarette as my theme, so I drew a lighter and a cigarette as a part of the project. Later on, I did not think that the song is expressive enough to me, so I changed my theme. I decided to create an imaginary galactic federation.
I had this idea after I watched the adult sci-fi cartoon, Rick and Morty. The creator of the show develops the idea of a galactic federation who runs the entire universe. I really appreciate the idea and I want to further it in my project. Therefore, I write a background story:
Galactic Federation is an interstellar government that is unknown to human beings. The federation now has more than 6000 member planets in the entire universe, but Earth is not one of them. The officials at GF believe that human beings are a bunch of savages who just learned how to play with nuclear power and the planet Earth is not qualified to join the federation in 500 earth-years.
GF is not the only interstellar power in the universe. Even though there are some other relatively smaller governments, but they keep a friendly and cooperative relationship with the strongest one, which is the Galactic Federation. Unfortunately, GF has its own enemy – Tyrants. Tyrants is a universal pirate team. They visited Earth thousands years ago and in fact, their attack directly led dinosaurs to death. Early men had witnessed the disaster. Modern Japanese director Eiji Tsuburaya actually found an ancient mural about the war between Tyrants and dinosaurs. Based on the mural, Eiji created the most famous monster in the entire film history – Godzilla. However, nearly nobody knows that Godzilla really exists.
To fight with Tyrants, Galactic Federation organizes the Galactic Federal Bureau of Investigation(GFBI) and the Galactic Criminal Investigation Department(GCID). The agents from these two departments are some cigarette addicts. But they are able to fight with the Tyrants with laser weapons.
Before the PS project, I made two conceptual pictures in Illustrator:
I want the finals to look like old-fashion Asian movie posters, but it should also leave some space for the audience to interpret by themselves. The design in the images above is put in the project as well.
Unfortunately, Photoshop was not nice to me. It crushed when the first work was almost finished.
There was no way to fix this and I had to start all over again. Nonetheless, I am satisfied with the finals.
The process of creating the two different images is not easy. Both PS files are larger than 600 MB.
Creating the images involving making layer masks, using selection tools, magic wand, adjustment layers including color balance, hue/saturation, invert, effects like gaussian bur and flame.
Overall, this is a very fun project and I really enjoy developing the concept of the Galactic Federation. I will definitely further this idea and use it in my other projects and designs.
