Horsley's Digital Media Blog

The concept behind this was that there's a lot of destruction about from the tornado while the focus remained there calm as anything, relaxed and composed. The person in front is me, the debris is of a few buildings that got blurred further out intentionally (to give the illusion of depth) and the cloud/dark sky was taken by me. For effect I played with the exposure and gamma settings to make it darker and also a bit more contrasted to give off the effect of it still being dark.

Basically the concept behind this was that the burning out (represented by the heater) provided warmth and life (the grass is really green but I did some tinkering of it with the brush tool set to Colour while I also had a few adjustment layers) , while everything behind it was cold, snowed on and just plain harsh and icy.

At first I had no idea what to do for this composite, but after finding out what the saying actually meant, my job was made infinitely easier. Pretty much the idea was that there was the threat of some chemical drum full of biohazardous material that had got itself wenched in between a tree and a rock, and then someone was picking it up or at least sitting it upright before carrying it away before disaster strikes. The cloud photo and the bare tree were my photos, the man was drawn by me, the drum, creek, and boulder were all different photos and the biohazard symbol was found on deviantART.

As soon as I saw the phrase "How The West Was Won", I immediately thought war, nuclear bombs in particular (which ironically was how the West was won). At first I was going to do a matte painting of a rugged terrain but that would've been too complex for me to pull off, so I instead took a photo of the hillside off into the distance and mostly used that for the terrain reference (this is the first photo). There was a good amount of manipulation done to the photos I pulled from the internet (mainly changes to the exposure and masking) and the woman was hand-drawn.

It is finally done!