I don’t particularly know much about Justin Bieber. I haven’t heard much of his
music and I am not fan. From what I read, he was found on a YouTube and he
previously won a number of singing competitions on his way to becoming famous.
In my view, there is not enough for me to have a negative view of him. He does
what he does and some people like his voice and he’s successful and I don’t have
any issue with that. So in a sense I am indifferent. Nonetheless, I still wanted
to do something funny and creative for my exercise. At first, I was thinking
about making a presidential ad for him and it was going to be a mural on a wall
displaying different occasions of him getting awards. He’s won a lot of awards;
even an NBA All-Star Celebrity Game MVP, which I think is funny and somewhat
ridiculous. So I wanted to parody and exaggerate his accomplishments by making
him president.
However, I decided to go in a different direction
believing that the president idea would take me too long to adequately
communicate so I decided to do something simpler and make him a comic book
character. I decided to make him the Joker because it seemed challenging and I
thought it would be funny. The picture I used was the only one I could find of
its kind (Justin Bieber doesn’t grin too often) unfortunately it was very low
resolution so I knew I could not blow it up too big. I removed his head and his
neck, with help from our professor, Malena, and I cut out his body. I started
off by brushing his skin an off white because I didn’t want it to be too light
or else it would look unrealistic. I brushed his hair green and if I remember
correctly I used the color replacement brush to do so. Next I used the overlay
brush, which saturated the color more, and made it look more realistic. I then
slightly pinched his smile to make it bigger and I also pinched the middle of
his upper lip downwards to give it that clown curve.
The next step in the
process involved finding a suitable body picture to put his head on. I wanted a
photo of him with a bow tie because the Joker sometimes is drawn with them in
the comics. However, there were only a handful of pictures and I chose one with
him in a white suit, which was a huge mistake because brushing it to match the
Joker’s suit was frustrating and, overly, time consuming. Trying to brush a
light color of anything into a dark color using Photoshop is a mess (maybe there
is a better way?).
I had to brush layers
of purple just to get it to look purple because it started off looking
like a light lavender color. To further add to
the frustration I had to brush these layers tediously using one click for each
layer because the layers did not blend well. When I finally was able to get the
color I wanted the suit looked very two dimensional, lacking sufficient shades
and depth. So I decided to add the details necessary to make it pop out morel. I
used the oil pastel brush to add high lights and to also add the darks. To my
surprise it was coming out well and I was enjoying it but after I got the suit
done and started on the vest I realized it was going to take too long and
overall, I was not satisfied.
Luckily, I found a very high-resolution picture with him
wearing a bowtie and everything was black. I was finally able to get the suit
the right color. Next I had to put the head I made on the suit and I had to
blend his neck in by using the clone stamp tool. From here it was a lot of
touching up and erasing unwanted edges to smooth things out. I also pinched his
grin more and his eyes to make him squint. I also deepened the lines around his
eyes by brushing them. I decided to make the project into a comic book cover and
used the photo at top of the post as a reference (I was using it since the
beginning). I also made a text to match the comic and I even gave it a spin by
calling it “The Singing Joke.” I wanted to blend him into the background so I
used the lighting filter.
Finally, I oil painted the figure using the oil paint
filter to make it look illustrated. It was last minute for me to employ the hat
and to incorporate a mic into the piece. I wanted the mic to look demented and
rusted (I achieved that effect using burn tool) so I took a picture of wires and
merged it with the mic. I put three different versions of this piece for all of
you to view and choose which one you like. Overall, I learned a lot from this
project and even though it was frustrating, at times, I still had fun doing
it.
