INTRODUCTION

This is a piece I put together to explore a different style to what I normally do in graphic design. Instead of smooth anti-aliased text and shapes, I wanted dirty solid pixels damaging my photography, punching a message into the viewer's face. This was an observational piece of life and what people perceive as the afterlife. I divided the composition into 3 vertical sections, with a quiet image of a light on top representing heaven, a deep garage at the bottom acting as hell and a cluster of images in the middle representing life.

STEP 1

My first part of this piece was the photoshoot. I'll usually start a project by venturing through the streets of Toronto, looking for things to shoot. I use manually operated 35mm Olympus camera, with Fuji film in this case, to get very strong greens. I do not have outstanding photography experience, but one thing I have noticed is that fuji film = stronger, richer colours, especially blues and greens, and kodak film = less rich colours with more emphasis on reds.

STEP 2

After placing the two photographs vertically in Photoshop, I went into Illustrator and created a basic graphic for what would start the overlayed treatment on top of the photography. Using a script font called KuenstlerScript (in the Adobe font folio). I selected certain charcters and placed them in various directions for a multiplying, messy effect. After that, i used the pen tool to create an abstract stroke which would cut through the type and look like an ink blotch. I got this effect by using the "artistic" brush strokes, which can be found in version 8 and higher of Illustrator.

STEP 3

Now this was the fun part. At the time when I put this piece together I had a cousin from Greece staying at my house, and she was working on her photography project on my system. I couldn't get over how cool the girl in her photos looked. She was letting out this scream in the image that just spoke to me, so (with her permission) I cut out the face and dropped it in there. I wanted the middle of this piece to be as grungy and dirty as it could get (without becoming cheesy). So I grabbed images from everywhere: the tags my friend Ricky Thomas filled my sketchbook with, an obscene photograph of my friends at a pool party (note: I am NOT in that picture=)), scanned package materials.. you name it. The majority of the images went through the process of desaturation, a boosting of the contrast and some messy eraser work (which included using the magic want with anti aliasing turned off and using the pencil tool as the eraser). A huge help also was the use of brushes from surfstation. They did a great job of aging the images and making them look like scanned print documents.

STEP 4

With everything pretty much in place, all that there was left to do was touch up some colour here and there with the hue/saturation to ensure a matching print. I also went into the middle section and colourized some of the elements as green so that they communicated well with the top and the bottom.

I enjoy doing work like this now every once in a while just to break free from the grid systems that normally confine my work. Putting this piece together really brought out the kid in me; I had fun doing it, exploring different techniques.

Alex Shoukas - alex@massivenumedia.com