Was a little bored, and thought I would explore an idea I’ve had for a while, which is taking a picture of a figurine into photoshop, and see what could be done with it. This is how my little experiment turned out:

I might end up doing a little tutorial on it, as the techniques required arent that hard.
To get an idea where it started, take a look at this:

You can check out the original model and pictures over at DC Here.

With that said, I’m sorry I havent updated a lot lately. Been having exams at my school (aced my Design Theory exam, so I might eventually bother writing that up in english and sharing), calming down after returning to Denmark, keeping in touch with my japanese girlfriend, and so on. I promise things will start going up in the near future!

A quick and personal “three cheers for Barack Obama, the latest President of the United States of America!”
Here’s to hoping for good things to come!

Here’s a bit of random footage I have from Tokyo! Everything from the Imperial Gardens (open only twice a year), kareoke, new years celebration at “Train Bar”, Illumination in Roppongi, the huge masses gathering in Harajuku for the post-christmas discount sales, and more!

Support a starving (no, not really) artist and buy some prints!

A big MERRY CHRISTMAS to everyone reading MentalMirage! Thank you for your continued support of this site!

Well ok, perhaps a little harsh of a headline, but still, I feel like holding no punches when dealing with people who steal the work of others.

Usually bloggers are quite happy if they get mentioned on other blogs and sites, and certainly I welcome this! But NOT if its just a direct copy of what I post here, without any mention of me or this site.
This is what happened today.

I got the following email (at the end of this post) telling me how my tutorial was found on another site, without any mention of me or this blog. A dear reader found this, after he found several of his own tutorials on said site.
The site in question is: http://www.photoshopx.org/
If you feature any tutorials yourself, you might want to check if any of them have been copied to there.

I am currently in the process of contacting the owner (as well as a few tutorial holders whos tutorials I found there), asking him to either link back here, or take the tutorial down.

The email:
“Hi Philip,

www.magicalplacesfineart.com”

Thanks Andrew for letting me know!

A recent article posted by Computer Arts Magazine brought up some interesting points.
The article focused on the current economic recession, and its influence on graphic designers, and how to survive that.The main part of the article, however, wasn’t interesting. What was interesting was the point at the end:

“The dotcom bubble saw a lot of people with Microsft FrontPage on their CV’s jump on the internet bandwagon and claim to be webdesigners. When the bubble burst, they scurried off to become estate agents and take advantage of the housing market bubble. If the same thinning of the herd happens again, leaving the cream of creativity, then maybe that’s the silver lining to the current cloud of uncertainty.” - Jason Arber.

He makes an interesting point, one that I by co-incidence have been discussing with others recently. Nowadays, everyone with a graphics package thinks they’re designers, and that’s a problem. Why? Some might think “well surely if they aren’t good, they simple won’t get paid, and no one will hire them.” Ah, but if it was only that simple. Read the rest of this entry »

Its my plan that in the near future, I’ll write up an in-depth tutorial on this image (watch out, its huge):

I also have planned to write a less in-depth image on how I achieved the effects of the Sichuan image.

All things to look forward to in the future!