Written portion of Joker Biebs Post

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.