Just finished up taking the time render a self promotion image featuring my oldest son Joshua. This represents the kind of image that I truly enjoy creating…high energy, very detailed, and presented from a unique and distorted perspective.

Per most of my figure work, Josh is based on several photographs. To get the perspective, I had Josh stand on a table while I photographed from below using a 12-24mm lens. The photos are cut up and assembled in photoshop and I “paint” on top of them. The rest of the imagery was generated in Modo.

The skateboard not only was rendered using a very wide lens, but also further distorted using a transform effector giving it some twist and scale distortion. A couple of point lights simulated the fire from the wheels. I needed to get more glow wrapping around the closest wheel and accomplished this by surrounding it with a luminated cylinder. I had a bit of fun with the image underneath the board itself, but giving the point of view, not much of that is revealed.

The pipe was rendered twice, once with the fire trail and once without, giving me control in photoshop just how much I wanted to reveal a glow left by the fire trail. The shape of the glow was simulated using a glowing twisted cylinder. Once in photoshop I used a layer mask to reveal the “fire.”

All elements were merged together in photoshop. Rendering the fire and smoke was the last step giving the image a real fun dynamic.