CREATING MY IMAGE: Making changes in Photoshop

I have to show at least five changes

Firstly, I chose my photograph and I enhanced the colour slightly. By enhancing both the saturation and extending the contrast, I think that the photograph looks as though it was taken by a more expensive camera!

Of course I had to chose the colour of the background. Grey seemed to close the jumper. I had used the pipette tool and grabbed some grey off of the jumper, thinking that it would harmonious, but the character blended into the background too much.

I thought of who the character was. I wanted a bright and modern image. I wanted to avoid flag type colours and I did want to create an 'anti football' feel. The composition was easy. I knew that I wanted to reflect the artist's work and use a large figure, looking out towards the viewer.

I took the prop image of Messi, From a wall in a shop. I want to play games with the image of the most famous footballer and the message will be of something else. I had to include a minimum of five shapes and I wanted to reflect the idea of a football and/or bubbles ('I'm forever blowing bubbles!). Circles are more fluid than straight edge shapes which also feel somehow more violent and angry - which is definitely not the message that I want to give.

The circles, although they were making the composition well-balanced, were a bit boring. I made an image based on a bar code - the message here is that we are paying footballers too much.  But I made the bar code separately, using rectangles on the same yellow colour. I then cropped the bar code into another circle and cut and pasted it on.

Too many circles? I kept borrowing the same colours by using the pipette, and added some simple stars using the simple brush shape. It was important to keep limiting my colour so that I was able to almost create a brand or a really professional design.

I had to play with the idea of 'binary Opposites'. This is where in art, design and film-making, a theorist Claude Levi Strauss, believed that imagery and meanings had more impact to the viewer, when they played with opposites. Love v hate, peace v war etc. I decided to just play with the idea of showing a footballer, but picked another sport to type. We had to use a minimum of three words. This is not really binary opposites, but I love the idea that it is playing games with the viewer. Because I am tricking the viewer they might look even closer.

I created some graffiti shapes to enhance the modern feel of the piece and also to make the composition balanced. I created the graffiti on the white board. It was brilliant because working so large meant that I really felt as though I was spraying an aerosol. The letters were not trendy enough, so I changed the colour of the first letter. I was worried though that you couldn't read the word so I created dark lettering and super-imposed a brighter/lighter word on top. I had to make certain that both words were the same shape and then I just shifted the top layer by the keys on the keyboard, rather than the mouse.

A strange gap meant that I created a separate arrow and cut and pasted it on, resizing and moving into place. I flattened the image and thought that this was the final piece.

I loved it but it wasn't as trendy as I had imagined. I returned to the original artist and knew that I had to remove all saturation form the character.

Carefully, I selected an area and removed all colour from the character, and with real care and patience, I infilled by hand using both, pipette and paintbrush and fill tool.