Dual of the Weaves

DISCLAIMER: This entire post was written while star wars music was playing. you might want to do the same for the full effect.

Here we go, the last and final post to this website... for photo illustration at least. It has been quite the year for photo illustration, and i cant think of a better set of images to sum it up. Not only in the fact that it combines a lot of what we learned throughout the year, but i feel like the character and theme of the picture sums up the year pretty well. Most of the projects may have seemed like a "Phantom Menace" at the start of every one of them, when i was unsure about what to do, but in the end, the good always prevailed and everything turned out amazing. Okay maybe that last part cant be said about the prequels, but you know what i mean. Any who... on to the actual project. Now, about 2 weeks ago in a classroom not so far way, Ms. Turner introduced our final. She said we had a choice of what to do, but no matter what we did, we had to end up weaving the photos together. the low poly was the chosen one, it would bring a close to the year, not rush it, but as i quickly found out, just like Obi Wan, it was the opposite. as time went on i started to realise just how long it was going to finish to my standards, and get it in on time. at one point i even considered heading to the darth maul to see if i could pay anyone there to do it for me. But as Ms Turner said at the start of the project, no one else was allowed to even touch our mouse, so i knew that was not an option and got right to work. I started off by getting my reference photo, and i knew i wanted it to be some sort of character from Star Wars and settled on the one and only phantom menace, Darth Maul. after i chose my reference, it was time to dust off the old ben kenobi (Low Poly Action) and get right to work. i had to re record the action, since the last time i made it, it was custom tailored to batman. i started off by recording myself making a triangle with the polygonal lasso tool, and then blurring the average under the filter menu. after i did that part of the action, i then copied and pasted the triangle to a new layer and clicked back onto the copy layer of Darth Maul, and stopped recording the action. the action made it so that instead of running through the multiple steps for just making one triangle, i could just press ⌘G and it would do all the steps in the push of a button. if it hadnt been for the action, i think i would of turned to the dark side considering the image for the low poly is made up of close to 1000 triangles. 1000 triangles times the 5 steps involved just to make 1 would have been just a little too much work for me, and it probably wouldve been over for me. The action was the high ground, and if i didnt take it, it wouldve been over anakin. i then started to go triangle by triangle, until i was done with the triangle part of the low poly. i wanted to make sure as i was making the triangles for the face, i was making them small enough to fit inside of the tattoos, so that you could really make out who it was, considering those face tattoos are the distinguishing factor that makes Darth Maul, Darth Maul. After i made the 1000 plus triangles, 800 of which were in the face alone, it was time for the fill in layer. the fill in layer went below all of the triangles and was meant to conceal all of the small gaps between the triangles i had made. The fill in layer was definitely like the sand to my anakin, very irritating and annoying. it took about two days longer than it shouldve and was really stressing me out, luckily it was done quick enough so that i had 2 days to figure out my weave. The weave is probably what makes this project different from the rest of mine... i actually hated doing it, but i had to since im trying to get that fabled triple-triple threat (RIP triple-triple threat, it was fun while i didnt have a 99). the weave was practically a project in and of itself, by far the most confusing thing ive done in a project. in order to get the horizontal and vertical lines for the weave, we had to make them separately and then select the layer thumbnail of those stripes, and then select either the low poly, or the black and white version of the original photo, and then duplicate that layer so it was shredded up like darth maul in the end of episode 1, into the strips we had made on the other layer. despite how simple it may sound while im explaining it, it truly was not at all. the first problem i ran into is that during my transfer of the layer thumbnail, my mind got clouded by the dark side and i could not remember for the life of me how to even set up the stripes, so that took me basically the entire period just to figure out how to set up the lines in the right order. after that i only had one more day to finish this, and if it werent for ms turner giving me until 11:59 tonight (friday june 9th) to write this, i think i would have given up the high ground and been defeated. if it wouldnt have been for my mom saying i could cut part of health 10th period, i would not have finished on time. any way... after i sorted out the lines, it was time to erase parts of the weave, so it looked like the strips were actually weaving in and out. to accomplish this, i used the rectangular marquee tool and deleted parts of my horizontal lines every other "box". but that wasnt all. in order to make it look like a true weave, the last step was to apply a gradient to practically every box. this is better scene in the picture of just the low poly. it created the illusion that they were going under and over each other. Ms Turner definitely gave us a final worth the challenge though... it was not something you could just stroll through. this was a fun year, and this project was the perfect way to end it. not every jedi strolls through there career, theres always new challenges to face, and new enemies to defeat. for me, this project was my Darth Maul... a problem i hadnt faced in a while in this class, but once i understood its ways, i was able to defeat it and bring balance to my year. Thank you Ms. Turner, the years been a blast, not even just because of the projects we did, but because of the fun and laughs we had throughout the year. ill miss the art department temporarily, but who knows... maybe ill come back, after all... theres always more songs to sing in the shower.