Shake it like a Polaroid picture! Hey ya!

Woah, would you look at that, its a person, but it's made out of Polaroids! that person is me, and i bet you're wondering how i did such an amazing thing. first, how did this project originate. well one day while in photo illustration Mrs.Turner told us that our next project was going to be based on one she has done in the past that looks like a collage made just out of pollaroids. she then gave us a link to a website tutorial on how to create the polaroids and make it seem like the photo is actually only inside the polaroid. after we got the technique down, she took us into the halway to take pictures of us. the two requirements where to not have your body closed up, and to have your hands in a position that could be used to hold polaroids. i wanted my pose to look like i was thinking very deepy about something, so i put my head to the side and my hand at my chin. i was realy satisfied with how it came out, so i stuck with it. once i got the picture into photoshop, i started to play around with the hue and saturation, and started to add a more reddish orange color to it. i noticed that it looked like i was being light by a fire, and i looked like a villain in a movie, that would be sitting in a big chair stroking a big fluffy white cat. I really liked how it looked and so i kept it like that. i then noticed it looked a bit dark, and so i used the burn tool to lighten it up. the next step was to cut myself out of the background. i did this by using the group selection tool and tracing over my body to select it. i then right clicked and choose select inverse, which selected everything but me, and deleted it. i then started to create the first polaroid. in order to do that i had to use the rectangular marque tool. i held down shift while making the inner part, so it would be a perfect square, and filled it with the minty green color as seen above. then to make the outer part i dragged around the first square, leaving the bottom part a little bit longer, just like a polaroid, and filled it with white. in order to make it look like there where actually images inside of the polaroids, i used a clipping mask. what the clipping mask does, is it only shows what is underneath the polaroid, and nothing else. i then was able to create a drop shadow on the polaroids so that when they overlapped, it looked like one was over the other. in order to mke more polaroids, all you had to do was duplicate the layers making up the polaroid, and then you could move it to a new location. i then had to make it seem like i was holding a polaroid, and so i place one of them just over my hand. i then cut out my hand and placed it over so that it looked like it was coming out of one polaroid, and then holding another. i did this to both arms. the next step we had to do was create a cool background. i found a tutorial online on how to make a planetary collision in photoshop, and decided it would be pretty cool. i started following the tutorial step by step, but hen it started to get complicated. i asked mrs. Turner if i could just have the space part of the photo as the backgroung and she said that it would be fine. after i put the space as my background, i did my favorite thing: i messed with the hue/saturation options. as i was changing the hue on a high saturation, i noticed it started to look really funky and i decided on the colors above. it reminded me of the colors you would find in a lava lamp, but also like the thermal vision the monster predator has, in the movie predator. all in all, this was a pretty fun project, and im glad i made the choices with the hue and saturation throughout. up next i will do some pretty cool double exposures, so stick around. Catch you flipside!

-Dylan Clarke