Or hopefully at least. My assistant and I had so much fun during October making monsters and horror scenes that we decided to make a new one every month.
I know for a fact this character took several changes and eventually morphed into this final character. That’s how the creative process works. On my end, I made sure to keep the tone of the concept in mind and keep a few ideas floating around to be ready for the final character. For this one, I wanted dark. Generally, people who walk around with their mouths sewn shut and carry giant sewing needles aren’t in cheery scenes. In processing, I tried to keep the contrast higher and the exposure darker. To add a little grittiness, I cranked up the clarity and texture. Finally, I added some grain just to add to tone.
Two things though:
1) Knowing what some of the less direct tools in the photo processing software I use really helped speed things along.
2) Even though I had a general idea of where I was going with processing, I did still try some other things just for the sake of experimenting.
On that second thing though, once again I can’t stress enough how important experimenting is. If you experiment a lot you will have lots of half idea fragments floating around in your head somewhere and your brain will be working to use those fragments when the time is right. Think of it as a library full of half ideas in your head that your brain uses to put together full ideas. If you fill it with a lot of fragments, your brain will have more to work with leading to more “AHA!” moments where an idea suddenly strikes you.
Lighting for this generally revolved around that strobe I have been testing out. The outdoor shots, of course, included the sun.