Dear Photoshop...

You may have won the battle,

BUT you have not won the WAR! 

This has definitely been a unique experience for me; being a psychology student for three years has taught me NOTHING about computer skills other than Microsoft Office (Word and Excel to be exact) and... SPSS.


Photoshop, I will conquer you!!!

In years to come. 

Disclaimer: please don't laugh at my digital art skills!  

Below, are some of the main process steps I took for my final three designs. The final one ("Where Cultures Meet - Congkak?") is most detailed as I already learned a lot from the others, and thus it shall be shared first! 

Every Project started with a new canvas, File> New> Width 16 inches, height 20 inches, 300dpi.

"Where Cultures Meet - Congkak?"

For all my drawings, I realized I needed outlines, therefore, illustrator was the more appropriate program used for that purpose - to first images from scratch. I pasted the picture:

...then I used the pen tool to create paths. 

The circles were drawn using the shapes option. 

As this piece was inspired by wallpaper designs, it was repetitive and therefore I could

copy and paste the circles to ease my burden.

Next, I drew an iPhone image.

I pasted both the iPhone and Congkak image onto

Photoshop as "Smart Objects".

Upon trial and error in Photoshop, I realized it is not so conducive to use the brush tool and paint something you want to copy and paste later on. These (following 3 images) were the outcomes of trying to do the marble patterns on Photoshop.

Therefore, back in Illustrator, a marble was drawn...

And eventually copied and pasted into Photoshop.

This is what the complete Congkak set looked like.

As the image was pasted as a smart object, it allowed me to highlight certain parts to paint using brush tool.
First I went to the layer for the congkak base, and used the wand tool to highlight it. 

I then used the paintbucket tool to fill in the colour. 

Thereafter, the brush tool was used to colout in the dark brawn shadows in the circles..

..And light brown was used to shade in the rest of the circles. 

A brush with a softer edge was chosen so that the colours could blend properly.

Upon completing the circles, I realized the congkak piece looked rather flat.

Therefore I found a wood textured image, and overlaid it onto the congkak.

Upon the enthusiastic journey of learning to overlay, however, I forgot to take a screenshot of the process. 

The outcome was as such:

Happy with my congkak piece, I started working on the iPhone. 

It was fairly simple, using paint bucket tool to fill in colours black and white, and also 

added texture for the telephone speaker (If you look closely at the design you would see it)

I then copied and pasted the iPhone designs to form a wallpaper-ish repetitive design.

Duplicating layers.... 

I also pasted the congkak sets onto the iPhones.

As the white background looked quite bare, I decided to change it to a black background. 

Seeing, however, that it was rather flat, I again Overlaid it with the below dark rainbow theme and chose the "colour burn" option. 

This is what my picture looked like in the planning stage. 

After some modification of ideas and digital touches, it turned out like this! 

"Where Cultures Meet - Her Shoes"


I made the mistake of not layering this project. 


Therefore the print screen records are few. 


Again, it started off with the drawing from scratch from Illustrator:

Upon completion of the shoe drawing, it looked like this. 

The border "S" shape was path-ed, then copied and pasted to form the border. 

The image was then pasted into Photoshop in "Smart Object" format.
Using the wand tool and paint bucket tool, colour was filled into the drawing.  

Realizing the ends were a bit messy, and filled with other lines, I went over it using clone stamp tool. 

By holding down alt+left click, I selected the area I wanted to copy and.... slowly did bit by bit until I reached the outline.  

To clean up the borders, I just used squares that had been filled in with colour. These added many layers to my piece. 

I added texture to the piece by adding filters to the purple part of the shoe (mosaic option), and a gradient tone to it, then I added grain texture to the traditional shoe. I felt the light pink background was a bit flat too, therefore I added a light texture onto it. The "S" borders were also edited using the filters (Filter>Filter Gallery>Sketch>Charcoal).

This is my modified sketch of my shoe drawing...

And this is the final product! 

"Where Cultures Meet - Tiles"

Again, the image was drawn using Illustrator, and this was the outcome. 

As this was the first ever piece I have touched with photoshop, therefore the process is full of trial and error. 

First I started using the shapes tools: ie, squares, polygon tool

Then, using the wand tool, certain parts were selected and painted with paint bucket.

For some reason, some regions could not be selected with wand tool and therefore lasso tool was used to select the desired part, and pain bucket was used to fill colour. 

Also, using gradient tool, colour gradient of light to dark was added onto the border tiles.

This is the painted outcome.

Using Filter> filter Gallery>Artistic>Drybrush, I added some effects to the border tiles.

Thinking it was still a bit flat, I added some gradient effects to the tiles, 

to make them look like they were reflecting light.  

Finally, I wanted to give it a slightly darker and older look, therefore I created a new layer, and selected Hue>Opacity 73% and Fill 45%

This was my first sketch of the tiles...

and this is the final outcome!

Dear Photoshop, 

Til we meet again.