I ended up dropping the whole Charizard skateboard idea because of this whole copyrights infringement thing. Who would have thought its illegal to steal other peoples work? so to keep it safe I decided I’ll just use a self-portrait. Only I own me.

In class, we saw this video about graffiti and these little dot lights things that got really popular with street artists. I was somewhat inspired to have a go at graffiti myself after watching this. I wanted to incorporate a camera into it in some way since the photo video side is what I like the most when it comes to the DMA course. I looked around for photographer, cameraman, camera stencils and couldn’t find anything I liked. So I made my own. Here is a link to the tutorial I used to help me get started.

Tutorial on turning an image into a stencil using photoshop – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFjaMVnGzGA

I started with taking the self-portrait. Used a tripod and 2 cameras. One camera to hold and 1 camera to take the picture. It took a few tries to get it how I wanted. The camera I’m holding is the Canon T5i with a battery grip and an 18-135 lens. The camera that took the picture is the Pentax Q7 with the 02 Standard Zoom 5-15 lens. The Q7 was set to auto and a 12-second timer.  I also wore black because I didn’t want any extra detail once it got to the final image after editing. This is also my first time doing this and I didn’t want any random situations happening because of what I was wearing.

To get that solid black and white look all you need to do is throw your picture on Photoshop and go to (Image – Adjustments – Threshold) You can then tweak the level of intensity after you click into that. You can see that bellow.

I had it set to around 116 but if I was going to do it again I would drop it to around 96. I found myself taking out allot I wouldn’t have needed to bother with if I had gone with a lower threshold from the beginning. If I had to give one point of advice that would help you in doing this I would say the more solid and fuzzy the better. That being said again this is my first time doing this so that could be completely wrong. Your results may vary.

Here is the finished product. It took me about an hour and a half but if I was to do this again, in general, I think I can get it done in under 45 minutes. One thing to remember is to add bridges that somehow lead out to the white. The reason for this is because you will be cutting out all the black you want the spray paint to be on. If you cut out any black that has white you want in the finished product then you messed up. I don’t know if I did it right here but it looks as close as I can tell. I really won’t know till I start cutting or applying paint. I might just skip the whole graffiti part and mess around with some saturation’s and some images to get the skateboard project done. I’ll see how time and the end result comes out and decide from there. Hope this helped and thanks to marcusthorpe for the tutorial.