Jewel

Finally I'm coming back to normal posts instead of random snippets of absolute boredom XP.

Jewel~

Anyways, yes, this is the lil' something I made for my sister's 21st birthday last December (her birthday's on the 26th, a day after mine and a day before my mother's =D). She's a big Ayu fan, hence the all-white sparkly theme. And its name being Jewel, after the song by Ayu-chan of the same name.

I completed this whole thingy in a day. Couple of hours. Of course the actual idea for it and the buying of the many materials to make it took around two months here and there. Originally I wanted to construct a bird cage out of wire, then spray paint it white...but then I decided to use what little logical thinking I had and came to the conclusion that it'd be too heavy and will warp the canvas eventually. So..yeah. This came out. Inspired by Ayu-chan's Jewel MV, particularly the closeup shot of her very well manicured hand holding a jewelled...thingy. Lol.

Made this thing at my aunt's apartment. The lift wasn't working, so I had to lug the canvas, my Nike shoebox (Just Do It! XD) filled with the bits and bobs, sketchbooks, and hot glue gun up six flights of stairs =_=. And it was at the final stage of completion when I realized I forgot to bring my bottle of PVA glue. Good thing my uncle unearthed a little bottle of it in his toolbox. Haha.

It's also suppose to have a key pendant hanging over the outstretched palm (sister found the pendant in DP so I got it for her Christmas present. Christmas and birthday presents are two different things in our household, yes). After the pendant was removed to be worn, it looked pretty bare although I designed it to still look good even without the pendant. Then I came across the super-duper awesome bird from a shop somewhere in town and that became the substitute. It's pretty fancy, the bird. Haha.

So today I finally decided to go round with taking a couple of shots of it to be uploaded on my dA account, but not before putting it through Photoshop to restore its original colours and adding some fancy sparkles like the ones in the Jewel video (XD). Then I decided that while I was at it, I might as well try some technique for faking aperture in Photoshop that I'd read in one of my magazines (no, sorry, I don't read seventeen or any of those gossip mags. The magazine I'm talking about here is technically The Ultimate Guide to Digital Photography. Hahaha.). Pretty simple, really. Making use of the pre-loaded Gaussian Blur in Photoshop, and layer masks. So you have something like this:


Then you put it through its paces, and you get something like...

This!!!

It's a simple way of getting swanky effects =D. Though of course mastering the aperture in your camera still achieves the best blurred-background effect. For those Photoshop fanatics eager to try this one out, a little hint: set the pixel count of your Gaussian Blur to 8~10 (in this case I went for 8.5). It makes your brain go woozy if the shot is too blurred XD.

So, yeah. That's all for now folks. Stay tuned to my next post- think I'll come up with some peacock-feathery tutorial. Or maybe I'll put up pictures of my Christmas tree if I can find the folder. Haha. Goodbye nao~

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