Fall 2013 Blog Entry #11

Inspired by the clever concept of the recent Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2, I began my sixth project on my own loosely-designed "foodimal." This particular food-like animal will resemble a ground-digging mole with a lemon as its head. I used various objects (including the fake lemon, the Belt plush toy from the Blu-ray 3D pack of The Croods, the Bionicle claws, and a pink eraser) to assemble my own imaginative animal. I scan them with the Epson scanner at my house and the other scanner at Ms. Sowa's classroom to convert them into graphic images for me to edit them on Adobe Photoshop. I dub it, a "Lemole" -- a mole with a lemon head.
After opening these object images on the Photoshop program in separate layers, I used the wand and eraser tools to delete the extra backgrounds while I change their sizes with the transformation tool. The closed eye and a mouth were drawn in by a pencil tool, with many different types of strokes. I even drawn in some furry details at the tip of a pink eraser to make up a small tail. Once I have finished putting them together to form the shape of a mole, I started to make up an underground setting with the paint bucket tool (ex., a completely brown background) and a paintbrush tool (ex., thin lines or big dots). Though I felt that creating a colorful background works better on Illustrator, something that I did not propose. Especially when I could have put the details in individual layers to make it less difficult when using Photoshop. But the best thing I did to make the finishing touch is by using the burn tool to put some shadows all over the tunnel created by a Lemole to make up a three-dimensional texture. If one could move away and see this picture above by focusing his/her eyes carefully, he/she could probably tell that the digging tunnel looked like it was round-shaped.
I think my parents will love this project that I had made. I give my special thanks to the makers of Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2 for reminding me that I could come up with my own ideas when inspired by something, which I have stated before in my sixth blog of this year's fall semester of NOVA.