Digital Photography and Imaging - Project 1

Azmina Fathima Haris (0337113)
Digital Photography and Imaging
Project 1

Week 9: Recomposition of Jacek Yerka's surrealistic paintings 

Our first project was to recreate one of Jacek Yerka's surrealist paintings, using our own images, or if not, ones taken royalty-free sites. We had to put to use everything we've learn so for about Photoshop and photo compositing to recreate the composition (which had to be done in 1980x1080).

Jacuzzi by Jacek Yerka

I chose this painting as I felt like it was doable but still a little challenging - this is one of his more obscure pieces - and even had two versions; one painted in 2003 and one in 2004, but I felt like his more popular ones would have been done already. It wasn't too difficult to find suitable photos for the composition, some where even pictures I took myself, but it was particularly difficult finding one of the shower and of the back of the old television.

Images I used to create the composition

Most pictures were sourced from Pexels and Pixabay, but a few of the pictures of bushes (not included above!) are my own.

Week 10: Process

I started off by masking the unnecessary parts of the lake first to form the shape. I also added some clouds using a brush to the background so the sea and the sky kind of blends in together like it does in the original painting.

Then I had to form the steps - and this was probably the toughest part, as the I couldn't find any suitable pictures of similar stone steps in the same colour. I added shadows using the brush tool and warped it to form the curve. I also added the other bushes around the lake and the shower head right next to it. 

I began adding the reflections of the objects in the lake. 

I added more plants and the TV set, in the lower half of the picture.

I used the brush to add more details - shadows and highlights wherever required and also smaller elements that I might've missed earlier, like the tea cup.

Process gif

Final submission - added a noise effect to all layers to achieve the grainy effect of the like in the original painting.

Final submission

Note: I encountered a problem with the original psd file in Photoshop and couldn't take all the screenshots of the progress, or show the complete process in the gif