Everyone knows the tragic love story of Romeo and Juliet. Since we know what happens in the end, I approached this project with the following goals: A. capture the darkness of the love story, B. experiment with different textures to create a classic look, and C. combine several different types of media to to come up with something worthy of adding to my portfolio.

 

Given my vision, I decided the most appropriate tool would be Adobe Photoshop. I started out by drawing a simple grid — centered horizontal and vertical lines, then I took Karen’s advice and added a second horizontal line to mark the golden ratio where I would align the hands. Next, I drew the background. I drew a vignette with the brush tool on a black background and then blended in a stone texture that was finished with a gaussian blur. Then came the text. I experimented with different textures and gradients before landing on the goldenrod effects chosen. Finally, all that was left were the graphics. I found a dagger that I thought was visually appropriate.  To draw the blood, I used the paint tool and applied a hard light blend. The hands, however, required more customization that what stock graphics could provide. Against a green screen, I took a picture of my hand clenching a kitchen knife and my girlfriend’s hand holding mine. At last, I did some retouching to balance all the color and used my Wacom tablet to blend and feather the edges.

 

Here again: we already know the ending, so I think this concept is effective because it forces the viewer to wonder what is going on outside of the frame. As Karen said in her post, I was very conscious of the way I was using gradients, but felt that using effects on all the text elements worked to my advantage. I’m happy with the way everything came together, but I think the true visual interest comes from what isn’t seen.

 

 

 

 

Here is the original photo. Yes, in real life I was holding my girlfriend's hair straightener. Thanks to Photoshop, this prop was replaced with the dagger seen in the piece.