Thoughts on life, love and faith by Plasticmind.

This one's been long in the brain, finally out on (proverbial) paper. John Walker of Kinetix Hosting was gracious enough to give me the opportunity to advertise in a local restaurant 'guild' magazine, so I put this together for my ever-coagulating design company.

The eye belongs to my gracious fiancee Jessica, and before you're up in arms about pre-spousal abuse, this is a clever Photoshop trick. I photographed the pencil near her closed eye, then keeping the camera where it was, I moved the pencil and she opened her eye. Then I simply cut the pencil from shot#1 and pasted it to shot#2 (with a bit of blurring at the bottom of the pasted pencil). Other modifications: a feathered gaussian blur on the pencil (creating the illusion of focal blur); a very carefully placed reflection of the pencil in the eye (spherized and transformed); colorization of the pupil (the original color wasn't at saturated). I also created a duplicated layer of the photo, blurred it about 5px and set the layer for overlay, giving it that "burned" look.

A design friend of mine said it had a bit too much of the "horror slasher film feel." Now that I look at it again, maybe it's true. It's due today, so there's no turning back. I suppose the inbox and voice mail will the final judge.