Ok so first up, I’m sure a few of you may have picked that it’s actually Saturday and not Friday. That is because a few things didn’t go according to plan. I while back I recall seeing a sped up video of someone painting in Adobe Photoshop. It looked great seeing all that went into the end piece of artwork. So I thought it’d be a cool idea to do something similar. Create a piece of artwork and speed it up. Sounds simple don’t it…

So the first thing I realise is that if I’m going to be doing a screen capture, I’d better clean up all the files I had scattered over my desktop. There went a good hour. Then I launched my screen capture program and made a test recording. It only recorded three frames per second. So there went another couple of hours as I played with the settings and made more tests until I got it right. The problem was, I’d never captured the whole screen before, just little parts of it. Capturing the whole screen in the format I was using, bogged the computer down so everything came to a standstill.

Then I opened Photoshop up and realised that I have it set up for using two monitors. I can barely screen capture one monitor, let alone two. So another hour disappeared as I rearranged my Photoshop panels. Arrrgggghhh! After I sorted it all out I saved all the settings so that next time I can jump straight into it. Unless I mess up my desktop again…

So with all of these frustrations I was no longer in a creative mood. I shut the computer down and decided to do it today instead. Needless to say there was some serious anger management taking place on the PlayStation last night. I was getting more kills than I have in quite a while.

So anyway… This morning I started. I hit record and began to create. I had thought about the base photograph a number of weeks ago and had originally wanted to create something with it to use as the Planet Hysteria heading image. Back then I got distracted by a cool image of a tree standing alone and, well, there it is at the top of the page. I think it’s better fitting too.

The image began to take shape. At the beginning, I didn’t really know what I wanted to create. All I had was a mood or tone that I wanted to portray. Something dark and gloomy, reminiscent of an apocalyptic wasteland. As you’ll see in the video, I went down a few paths that I didn’t like. At one point I spent quite a bit of time putting a boat into the scene, washed up on the shore. I didn’t like it. I felt it made the image too cluttered and I liked the emptiness of it.

The whole process took around three hours to complete. I think the end picture works, although it’s not what I had originally envisioned when I first thought about the photo a few weeks back. Upon seeing the completed image I thought of the title Lugubrious, which means looking or sounding sad and dismal. Glum.

I’m not entirely sure if I’m totally happy with the image and I’ll probably go back to it at some point and do some more work to it. But for now it is what it is. So without any further ado, here is the video of how the image was made in Photoshop.

You may want to click on the ‘Full Screen’ button, second from the right at the bottom to see all the detail. Hit the Escape key to bring you back to this page.

If any of you like the post-apocalyptic genre as much as I do, or even just a little bit, you should visit one of my friends web sites QuietEarth.us, named after the classic movie. Don and the gang review and keep up to date with all things apocalyptic as well as genre films.

The music is Ghost I by Nine Inch Nails. I found this whole album extremely inspiring and have created a number of images while listening to it. It was released under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license. Which means I can use it here for non commercial purposes. You can purchase this awesome album by clicking on the Amazon ad below.