Saturday, May 31, 2014

Cat Art Hop: The Making of a Hazmat Cat

We had tons of fun with Thursday's post on our fave Father's Day gifts.
So today we thought we'd use the Cat Art Hop to show you what we did to make it all happen. (Other than buying the radioactive salt shaker, that is!)

Remember this photo of Allie?



Here's what went into the making of it:

First, we found a photo of a hazmat suite we could legally use and alter, using a Creative Commons search on Flickr. We found this photo by Mathew Ursua:

We cut out the suit only, using the lasso tool in Photoshop, then did the same with a photo we had of Allie. Below, you see all the layers we used and how we used them.


We highlighted the blue/green gloves and used the Hue tool to change them to Allie-Pink. 
We did the same with the yellow suit. And then we grabbed the background from the photo of Faraday sniffing the (empty) shielded container (see Thursday's post).

(In case you were wondering, yes it was a real container but nothing had been in it for months, rendering it totally safe. [P 103 has a half life of 16.99 days.] But even when it did, the sources inside were shielded as well. Honest - no kitties were harmed in the taking of these photos!)

The layer I think that makes this image the most "believable" is the one that contains the highlights & reflections for the plastic face shield. 

To achieve this, I created a brand new layer, sandwiched beneath the hazmat suit but above Allie.

Then I free-traced long bars that met up with the reflections in the plastic. Before I used the fill function, I feathered the edges by 2 points. After filling the selection with white, I changed the opacity to 35% until it looked transparent.

Fun, huh?

For more way cool Cat Art, hook up with the Cat Art Hop at Athena's blog here!

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16 comments:

  1. Oh my! You are the Master and I am but a humble human. I read how you did it and still can't comprehend! Really incredible and love it!
    Marty's Mom

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  2. Oh my oh my oh my....I tinks yoo also need creative geniuses for hooooman staff. *sigh*

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  3. Play bows to you. A bit too technical for us but we are impressed. Have a super Saturday.
    Best wishes Molly

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  4. Incredibles!!! Mes LOVES it! Thanks for telling us how yous did it!
    Kisses
    Nellie

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  5. I read that and all I heard in my head was, "blah blah blahblahblah."

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  6. Mom dabbles in photoshop, but she loses patience on a project like this one. You did an awesome job!

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  7. Wow that is impressive and you did a fantastic job with Allie's suit!

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  8. What a fun tutorial! I love the reflections too. Awesome job!

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  9. Great job! We really like finding out the secret behind how you did the reflections on the face shield.

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  10. Very cool....we always wondered how to do things like the face shield. We have pics of Raz in the race car and airplane and had no idea how to do that.

    The Florida Furkids

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  11. That's very cool! The mom really needs to learn photoshop.

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  12. We would like a suit like that for when we use the box after Grayce!!!

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  13. You did an amazing job! My husband loves using layer masks and working with photos. I love your photos!

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  14. OMC You;'s so smawt!!!! yous lost us at da lasso tool. MOL But at least now wees know what dat's fuw. MOL One of these days we'll figgew it all out..... meez hopes. Pawsum foto!!!!

    Luv and Hugs and Kitty Kisses

    Dezi

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  15. Wow, you sure are an accomplished photoshopper! Very nice work!

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Coolio! A comment? For US?