Last night I spent a few more hours manipulating pixels to put young Andrew into various amusing scenes.
Let me get you up-to-speed on this situation:
When Ben Cottle (@Benaud) first presented this photograph of his son, Andrew, (at left of text) on his Plurk time-line, I jokingly suggested that it “looks more like Luke SkyWalker“. Ben says he contemplated ‘shopping a wee light-sabre in there, but too much effort for the small visual gag‘!
This got my brain working overtime with lots of ideas and I had to take it a step further!
I love editing images and I really enjoy the opportunity to test and improve both my use of both GIMP and Photoshop CS3. So I decided it would be fun to see where Andrew could be ‘found’ in his little white outfit.
Since the joke was that he looked like Luke Skywalker from Star Wars, adding the sabre to his attire (as if it was just a ‘toy’ that a kid would drag along) was fun and easy. Putting him on Tatooine put it all into perspective. See my previous article to see those two images
Last night I put Andrew into new scenes:
Andrew Skywalker in his Speeder
This first image includes four layers: [1] An original speeder from the first Star Wars movie, [2] an obscure landscape found buried somewhere deep on the internet, and [3] a quick little image I created using GIMP plugins (don’t ask how, it was an accident!) plus [4] Andrew into the drivers-seat. More time was spent on getting the canopy to cover Andrew, but it didn’t work properly. I’ve not worked out how to photo-manipulate a curved canopy over a flat surface. Anyhow, about 90 minutes was spent on this to get the colouring right. Each layer has been saved separately, so I may go over it again as my PS-CS3 skills improve.
Andrew in New York
This was a quick project, using only two obvious layers with a bit of color-adjustment. Andrew was resized to match the size of the woman and the height of the glass balustrade. Actually, this was meant to be a parody of ‘Sleepless in Seattle’, but my knowledge of US city-scapes is rotten. Turns out this is New York! So I will be doing another version, complete with teddy bear. But minus the celebrities … we don’t want anyone to upstage young Andrew!
As you can imagine, I had a lot of fun! I am planning a few more scenes with young Andrew in scenes around the world, plus some more unusual ones, all of which should make his parents laugh with delight. I have a few ideas that are merely ideas in my head that I have no idea how to create … yet I’ll give it a good try!
But because I have other activities going on that actually bring in the dollars, Andrew is a side-project for my quiet nights when I am trialling my self-teaching of both GIMP and Photoshop CS3.
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