Visual Blooper
a. What gave you the idea for your project?
I am a huge lover of the show My Little Pony so I knew at the beginning I wanted to incorporate that somehow. The show is primarily made up of different horse species.. Unicorns (horn) , pegasus (wings) and alicorns (a horse with wings and a horn). The alicorn character I used is known as “Princess Celestia”, she is basically the queen of the entire world (in the show the “world” is known as Equestria). She is an incredibly powerful character so I thought it would be funny to show her in a somewhat “vulnerable” (air quotes here) position but instead of looking stressed, she looks happy or content. This shows her somewhat laid back nature as a character!
b. Where did you find the images you used? (cite them if you can) what file types were they?
The background image is a South Netherlandish piece called the “The Unicorn is Attacked (from the Unicorn Tapestries)”. I found the piece on “The Met” site and simply screenshotted the image when it was at full size.
- The citing: https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/37.80.3
The image of Celestia was found on the official wiki page (the image/png vector is credited to “dashiesparkle”! This image already had a transparent background (a png) so it whats relatively easy to incorporate!
- The citing: https://mlpfimroleplay.fandom.com/wiki/Princess_Celestia
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c. Explain why and how your-arrangement of these elements communicates what it does.
In the piece “The Unicorn is Attacked”, there is a unicorn (the original one) in the center trapped in only what I can assume to be a swamp surrounded by hunting dogs and men with spears. I decided to place Celestia over that image of the original unicorn and blend the piece to look like she was the one being attacked! I added a few clipping mask layers with different brown textures on top of both Celestia and the tapestry itself so that everything would blend rather seamlessly color-wise!
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d. Challenges and Successes? yes I know that this sensitive territory for some... but- what went right? what went not so right? take a step back and separate the technical / application struggles with the visual/ communication challenges.
I primarily used Procreate (and a bit of photoshop) for this piece…! I am far more comfortable with using Procreate but because it is mainly an illustration program, it was hard finding the right tools to make my vision come to life. When placing Celestia over the “original” unicorn I was left with some areas fully covered while other areas of the “original” were fully exposed. To combat this I decided to do a mixture of using photoshop and Procreate. In some areas (such as the horn) I manually drew over the background with the brush pen (by using the eyedropper tool) and blended everything together with different brushes and various colors. From afar I think it looks pretty believable but when you zoom in you can see the areas that were drawn over. For the area where the hooves were exposed I also drew over that area with a brush pen (same method as before) but also used the duplicating tool in Photoshop to attempt to blend it better. This was not as successful because the shrubbery around the hooves was hard to replicate accurately, and it doesn't look so great up close (but looks semi believable from afar/ zoomed out). However, something that was really difficult was attempting to blend together the cartoon style of Celestia with the more stylized look of the tapestry. The harsh lines of Clestia’s png didn't mesh as well with the background (when attempting to create that natural perspective). Overall I think once I practice more I can do better with this piece but for the time being, I’m happy with it!
