For this Project, I wanted to make a piece about the legendary Tony Hawk. First I imported some standing photos of Tony as well as some action shots.

I cut out both of the standing photos.

I chose my two action photos and cut them both out from their background and started moving things around to see how I would like to arrange everything.

Tony Hawk is from San Diego California so I wanted to incorporate his hometown in some way. I decided to find a photo of the skyline, cut out the sky and use it as a background. I also moved both action shots of Tony to either side of the main subject.

I moved the skyline image around and turned the opacity down as I didn't want it to distract the eye from the main subject. I found a gradient blue background and decided to put it behind everything. I horizontally flipped the initial photo of Tony holding the skateboard and made the bottom appear to fade out with a low opacity brush and moved it to the right side of the subject. I also imported some text and started playing around with the sizing and location. Lastly, I decided to move each action shot out from the center a little but as I thought the center was a little too crowded and the sides needed something to fill the empty space.

I decided to add duplicate layers behind each text in different colors to make it stand out more. I thought that the left side of the piece was a little boring so I decided to use a rectangle to make it more visually interesting. This is my first time using shapes and I hope to be more creative with them in the future. I also took every individual photo into the Camera Raw Filter and adjusted various settings to make it more visually appealing. Lastly, I found an image of a cloudy sky and put it above the background layer to make it seem like Tony was high up in the sky.

After taking every thing individually into the Camera Raw Filter, I adjusted the curves on both action shot by boosting the blues to make them blend into the sky around it to make it look more natural way up in the sky.

I thought all of the main subjects photo were super cool but needed some more pop so I duplicated the center subject and both action shots and put those layers behind and to the side of each original layer and colored them black and white to make everything more interesting to the viewer. The final product is below.