Assignment #4 - I'm A Toy

Buckle up! This is gonna be a long post. I can feel it...

The final product.

 If one couldn't already tell by the title and top picture, the goal of this project was to use a number of Photoshop's tools in order to turn ourselves into toys (or robots, or cyborgs, but that's semantics at this point). The main guidelines were to make sure that our material was convincing enough and that we had a good environment to go along with; otherwise, this project provided a relative amount of freedom. As a proof of concept, we were each required to submit at least 3 different proposals for this project in the form of sketches, which I enjoyed, because sketching is totally my forte!

My three proposals were to fashion myself after a Nendoroid, a plush toy, or a bobblehead. The plush toy idea was dropped after the realization that making the texture look convincing would be far too time-consuming, and the bobblehead proposal was scrapped because both because I didn't think it would take much effort and because I wasn't actually able to guarantee that I could get someone to take part in my photo. That left the Nendoroid proposal... for those who don't know, Nendoroids are essentially deformed plastic figures with a bunch of swappable joints and faceplates. It was the perfect blend of challenge and familiarity for me.

This was my final sketch proposal! Isn't it cute?

Going into the project... I'm reminded of a quote in class, saying something along the lines of "your next project will be time-consuming, but this one will be difficult". It's a good quote, but at the time I didn't realize difficult ALSO meant time-consuming... I kept track for this project, and it took a total of around 15 hours to complete, not including the several hours I spent sketching proposals and trying to use the camera. (It always comes back to that camera, doesn't it...)

The first step was trying to change up the material from flesh and cloth to shiny smooth plastic, which was relatively painless but also extremely precise. The Smudge Tool was my best friend here, as it made smoothing out the skin a lot easier, but it was far from the only thing I used. It also took a bit of blurring and a lot of painting, especially to emphasize the highlights and shadows on certain areas.

Following that, a variety of edits were made to add extra detail, simplify facial features, and overall make myself look more like a typical Nendoroid. This included adding joints on the ankles, sleeves, and shorts of myself, painting over the hair to make it look more like a detachable wad of plastic instead of being fuzzy, and completely painting over the nose, mouth, and ears. Thankfully, despite what I initially thought, I was able to leave most of the body untouched proportion wise as it matched the Nendoroid I used as a base.

I can't tell if the regular head size makes it look more normal, or even creepier...

There was, however, one key exception to this. The last big step was to increase the size of the head drastically so it looked more in line with a Nendoroid figure, and this was tricky to figure out. I tried increasing the head size at the start of the project, but I wasn't happy with how painting over it afterwards looked, so I decided to wait it out until I was nearly done with the head to make any edits to that area.

I experimented a lot with ways to increase the head size while maintaining a decent quality, including shrinking the rest of the image instead to make the head look bigger. Ultimately, I used a technique learned in class to make a new layer out of everything visible, cropped out the head, and adjusted it accordingly. I also used the Liquify tool to adjust the eye size and make my head more circular instead of oval-shaped, and painted over many features to make it look better quality. After that, the only steps left were to add a shadow and grain filter to make my appearance in the photo more convincing!

My favorite part of this project was learning to use the Liquify tool, for completely serious and useful reasons.

Overall, even if it didn't come out exactly like how my sketch depicted, I'm still very happy with how this came out. The tools that I got to use in this project were some of my favorites so far, and even if I was admittedly pretty sour about my progress at the beginning, that attitude began to change as I got farther along. It did take up a lot of my time, though, and I'm looking forward to getting at least a few days of peace and quiet before starting my next project for this class... it's definitely going to be exciting!