A "Fantastic" Selfie! - Piece Breakdown

Happy Halloween everyone! In honor of the holiday spirit, I thought it would be fun to do another Photoshop breakdown of my latest photo, which is also my Halloween costume this year! As you are well aware by now, my favorite Doctor from Doctor Who is the 9th Doctor! I previously made some Psychic Paper so I decided to complete my first ever cosplay! I wanted to take a really cool portrait to feature the costume, and I thought it would be funny if the Doctor was taking a selfie on the TARDIS! Here's how I achieved that photo!

The first step was to take a photo! I set up my green screen behind me to make it easier to remove myself from the background later on! I also used three lights to get myself nicely lit so I would somewhat match the background image I picked. You can actually see my lighting setup here if you're interested!

The next step was to remove the original background and place in my new background image.

This is where I really began to make the photo blend in with the scene. I did some basic color correction, removed the green spill leftover on the jacket, and got rid of the shadow cast on my face by my Sonic Screwdriver.

Now I added some shadows to the side of me and did a final color grade of the image so it match the background.

The final step for this part of the composite, was adding a lens flare to the sonic and a slight vignette.

Now I took another photo of myself taking a selfie. I didn't have any fancy lighting set up for this one, but I did make sure I chose a lens that would leave my background nice and blurry. This was important for later

Next I cut myself out of the original photo and threw in a blurry version of my background from the other photo.

The next step was to piece the background and foreground together and do some color correction to the foreground to match the scene.

Next I added in the composite image from earlier, and recreated the iPhone camera interface. I also added a slight glow coming from the screen.

The final step was to add a flare behind the phone, integrate the screen, do a final color grade, and voilà! It was done!

I hope you guys liked this piece, I'm really really happy with it! Special thanks for my buddy Edward Boswell for giving me some great feedback while I working on the final composition!

Thanks for stopping by, I hope you have a happy Halloween and as always, enjoy!

~Josh 

Freelance Fun! - A Very Steampunk Wedding

So recently I was hired to do a Steampunk inspired illustration for a wedding. The clients best friend was the bride, so she wanted a piece done of the bride and groom together in a clock tower with the time set at their wedding. I was provided with a few pictures of the couple, a description of their outfits and a layout sketch of what the piece should look like. From there I came up with this sketch, which I sent to the client.

After the client approved the sketch, the next step was to line the piece!

The next step was to add some color!

Finally, all that was left was to add some textures, effects, and color correction, which leaves us with the finished piece!

And thats it! As always thanks for stopping by and enjoy!

~Josh

Animation Tutorial!

Recently I've been playing around with a new rig from meryproject.com

I was asked by a friend to do a tutorial on how I approach prop interaction and thought Mery would be a fun rig to use for that tutorial!

Animation Tutorial - Prop Interaction from Josh Janousky on Vimeo.

As always enjoy!

~Josh

Freelance Fun - Light Flight II

In my last blog post I talked about a packaging design I did for a magic trick my good friend Jeff Prace came up with. Jeff recently asked me to do a 3D rendering of the packaging along with a render of a Bic lighter. Now anyone who knows me knows that modeling is NOT my strong suit, so I knew immediately that there was one guy who could help me out. As I've mentioned before, James Bridges is a beast when it comes to modeling and quickly obliged with this amazing lighter model! All that was left was to apply some shaders to make it look real, light the scene, and do a little bit of compositing. Once that was all done, we were left with this, the finished product!

Keep your eyes peeled for more awesome magic from Jeff soon and if you ever need a model done, hit up James!

As always thanks for stopping by and enjoy!

~Josh