Chimera

My Chimera so far

My Chimera without background or effects.

 

 My Chimera with with background and lighting effects.

Chimera Research

The Chimera or Chimaera (Greek: Χίμαιρα, Khimaira, from χίμαρος, khimaros, "she-goat") was, according to Greek mythology, a monstrous fire-breathing female creature of Lycia in Asia Minor, composed of the parts of multiple animals: upon the body of a lioness with a tail that ended in a snake's head, the head of a goat arose on her back at the center of her spine. The Chimera was one of the offspring of Typhon and Echidna and a sibling of such monsters as Cerberus and the Lernaean Hydra. The term chimera has also come to mean, more generally, an impossible or foolish fantasy, hard to believe.




Genetic Chimera
A chimera is an animal that has two or more different populations of genetically distinct cells that originated in different zygotes involved with sexual reproduction; if the different cells emerged from the same zygote, it is called a mosaicism.

One of the first Human/Animal Chimera.  A mouse splilced with the genes that controls the shape of the human ear.


Platypus

 The Platypus was originally thought to be a joke to fool zoologitsts when it first turned up in a british museam.  In retrospect its easy to see how they came to such a conclusion; with the bill of a duck, body of an otter and tail of a beaver that is also a an egg laying marsupial.


Transformers 
Resisting the urge to focus on the traditional mythological concepts of a Chimera I immediately thought of my childhood obsession TRANSFORMERS!  A transformer is a typical chimera in every sense; Its part robot, part vehicle, part weapon, part machine and part organism.

Classic Transformers

My favorite transformer Soundwave: part robot and ......part tape recorder..? (the 80s)

 Unicron: from the transformer movie, part transformer, part planet, part Orson Wells

Transforer Soundwave from the latest movie

  

Alternative Transformer Concepts

Transdyson

Photoshoped Transformer Car

Mobile Phone Transformer

USB Transformer

Digitaly Designed Transformer Chimeras

 This chimera appears to have been created from various parts of transformers from the movie with a face and background photoshope in.

This is something along the lines I am thinkin of creating by using the contents of my bag.

Again this is like someting I would like to emulatte but itsead of cuting croping and pasting (which is what seems to have mainly been done here) I'll create numerous layer masks and copy and "paste into" a selected area which I will draw with the polygonal lasso tool probably over an existing transformer/robert design or from my own drawing.


 Bag Contents

 

 My Contents: Plastic cutlery, 3 Pencils, 6 coloured ice popsticks, wallet, chain, keys, phone, 2 siccors, 1 marker, 3 pencil sharpeners, 1 sd card, 2 pens, pack of scalpel blades, pack of cards, money, notebook, rubber, tipex pen, filling folder, laptop.

Process

 I drew this image with pencil in my sketchbook to use a base structure to build my chimera around (the  contrast here is greatly increased).

Items used.

I decided to use mainly my phone and other metaclic objects that I had in my bag like my pencil sharpener, wallet buttons and coins which I then adjusted in photoshop to get the right colour and tones and then placed them into layer masks using the paste into option and I painted in shadows to make it look more realistic.

Digital Media in Art and Design - Digital Illustration: Car of the Future (apparantly)

In this assignment I was asked to create a digital Illustration for a magazine article useing Adobe Illustrator.  I chose Tomorrows car for Time Magazine.

I chose this image because of it seemed to tick all the boxes for this assignment.  I liked the colour and the shape, It was slick, futuristic and I thought I would get a better understanding of gradients by using this image.  Having been a while since I last used illustrator I forgot about paths work and that you can't just paint bucket multible areas of the same path with different colours and expect the same thing to happen in photoshop.  Only realising this after I drew the whole outline meant I basically had to draw this twice.  But all in all it was well worth the hassle cause I'm pretty happy with it.

Critique: I'm quite happy with the way in turned out, I do think I could have used the gradients a bit more effectively and the pen tool alot more efficiently at the start.
If I was to do this again I would change alot of things especially since wathcing a whole load of tutorial vids during this project.