Man vs. Beast
The concept of 'Man vs. Beast' is based on the juxtaposition of man/industry and beast/nature. This dramatic contrast is something that I often think about as a lover of both technology and nature. How will I work to advance the world technologically whilst simultaneously protecting or, more preferably, improving the environment?
Original Photographs
Photographs (left to right) from Michael Gaida, David Whittaker, André Cook, and Amar Saleem. All original photographs used in this composite image are licensed under the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license.
Development
The composite image was created using Adobe Photoshop CC.
For both the man and wolf photographs, the subject was cropped from the rest of the image before adding a layer mask to hide the remaining background. Both were also converted to grayscale using smart filters to make them more consistent as well as provide a higher level of contrast between their superimposed images.
Next, the nature and industrial photographs were added in separate layers. As with the other images, smart filters were applied and the edges were hidden using layer masks.
The modified man and wolf layers were duplicated and placed on top of the nature and industrial layers. Then I used a custom Photoshop brush, modified to have a sort of grungy effect, to erase part of the layer masks so only some of the more prominent features remained, like the eyes and ears. This prevented the nature and industrial layers from essentially washing out all of the detail of the bottom layers.
Finally, I used another Photoshop brush to create a splatter effect for the background and added a custom slate blue / green gradient to that layer.
