A friend asked me to do a personal favor of retouching a photo. Here is the progression.
The original image (cropped to the face—the whole image is much larger, but I wanted to show the details):
Brightness adjustments:
The first installment in my series “Our Heritage” appears in the June 3ABN World magazine. I wanted a creative introduction to this first story, and this is what I came up with:
I stand at the edge of a small lake. It’s quiet here—a good place to meditate, to think. As I skip a rock across the water, I notice the ripples. At each point where the stone strikes the surface of the lake, waves radiate outward. Together they look like a series of points, each sending out signal waves in every direction. In a sense, that’s what this series is about. Our Christian heritage is a string of pivotal events, each with its own lasting repercussions in the stream of time. It’s a story that inspires me every time I think of it.
I recently created a page for 3ABN on Facebook. I needed something for the picture, so after a little brainstorming and experimentation, I created this:
UPDATE: Art has been updated since the original post.
For the November issue of 3ABN World, we needed to illustrate a devotional article based on the famous Apollo 13 mission. After a futile search for a useful clipart image, I decided to take the plunge and make my own composition. Keep in mind that I do not have much experience in 3D — I think I could count my 3D illustrations on one hand — and I had only six hours or so across two days to work on this. Besides that, my tools were a clunky 3D application called Swift 3D 4.5 (nothing “swift” about it), SketchUp 6, and Photoshop CS2.
I found a number of 3D models. Interestingly, each one was different in various ways, including in regards to the colors and materials used for major pieces of the Apollo command module. So I compared them all, noted the common features, and also perused some online articles about the Apollo 13 mission (characterized by fuzzy, black and white images). In the end, I went for as accurate as I could guess, along with adding a few random stylistic elements that are almost certainly not true to life, but which make it look more believable.
In the November issue of 3ABN World magazine there is a recipe for Blueberry “Buttermilk” Pancakes (dairy-free), contributed by Jill Morikone. In her short introduction, Jill tells how these pancakes became a weekly tradition in her home. For the design of this page, I decided it would be nice to show a married couple eating pancakes at a candlelight dinner, as Jill had described the tradition in her home.
This is original photo was taken by my assistant, Kenton Rogers. The couple at the table are Jill and her husband Greg:
