David Henry Digital Imaging

 

After hours of messing around with blending modes and shuffling around different images, I'm finally starting to get really rich compositions that I'm happy with!

So I've been playing with different blending modes and experimenting with textures, and this is what I've come up with so far. I'm pretty happy with the composition as it stands at the moment in terms of subject matter/framing, but I'm still going to experiment some more with blending some more relevant images into the mix. And the effects Photoshop offers are always fun, so I'll "destroy" my image a little bit with those and see where I get.

  For my iconic image, I chose the burning monk from 1963. In June of that year, a Buddhist monk named Thích Quang Duc burned himself to death at an intersection in Saigon. He did this as a response to the South Vietnamese Diem regime’s discriminatory Buddhist laws. What mainly prompted this out of all the new laws was the banning of the Buddhist flag and the new pro-catholic sentiment in South Vietnam. This image is one of the most powerful I've ever seen as far as standing up for what you believe is concerned, so I decided to choose it. I'm not too sure what I'll do with it yet.

As per suggestions from the first critique, I rearranged the cows slightly and made their necks bigger. After that, I continued to work on the shading of the toasters to make them look crisp. The mesh tool was my friend here, with several things such as the rounded edges of the toaster being shaded with it. After a while of fiddling, I was happy with them as they looked good in the environment, so I moved on. After that was settled, the next challenge was to make the field look like a wheat field. I tried doing some image trace wheat images, but none of it looked very good so I decided to make my own wheat vectors and position them around the field. I didn't do every single one by hand (that would've taken ages). Instead of doing that, I made a row of copies and did object, transform each to get slightly random rotations so they weren't all sticking up one way.  The biggest challenge was definitely getting this field looking good. I sat on this for forever, trying different