Stars + Stripes

All I really was trying to show with this project was the red, white and blue theme. I didn't have much of a plan going into it and I wasn't very into the assignment, but I wanted to do my dog again because I enjoyed doing the last digital portrait of her because she has such a complicated coat. I also wanted to try and see if I could figure out how to scale everything from one colour to another effectively. In this case since I was going from more of an orange scale to a red scale and a grey to a more vibrant blue it was a little easier than a more extreme change, but it was still definitely harder than just using the natural colours. Overall I like the way it came out because I think it shows the intended theme pretty well while still being something I wanted to work on.

I used photoshop for this portrait because I thought the more solid, vibrant colours would suit this project best. I didn't want to have to go over the same sections over and over to darken them because that's very time consuming. This was time consuming as well but I liked knowing that each section was done right the first time. I think digital was a good choice also because I didn't have to carry anything home and worry about it getting ruined.

I didn't really do any research prior to starting this project. I tested a couple things at the beginning to see how changing the colours would work, but even that was only enough to be sure it would work, not really to actually get good at it. A lot of this project was just me experimenting with different ways to scale the colours and still have them look good and clean. I was also originally going to put white stars on the bandana, but in not wanting to mess with the texture of the bandana as it already is I decided I would rather just go for a more red white and blue them than a strictly stars and stripes theme. The stripes themselves were already kind of loose if only because my "stripes" were in River's brindle so I think leaving out the stars suited the project in this case.