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This is my own photoshop painting, "Spear Fishing Conflict," which is a fully repurposed painting by the 19th century painter Albert Bierstadt, originally titled "Indians Spear-Fishing."

 

The idea for this project came from digital artist Jeff Bennett, who took landscape paintings by Thomas Kinkade and added his own sprinkling of Star Wars. My favorite of his work were the transformation of two seperate cottage paintings--one during the day on a mountaintop, and the other at night by a river with a bridge. Both of his alterations were only to add one and two elements to the original painting, respectively, the first being one large star destroyer which takes up half of the image, and the other being two AT-ATs, further in the background of the night scene. This was my favorite gallery for a full year. I had never seen this sort of creative fusion between an old style of oil painting and new-age photoshop, nor the idea to splice together Star Wars in calm landscapes. This became my ideal aesthetic: tasteful juxtaposition across generations. When I "stole" this idea, I decided that I would be making mine much more extensive.

 

Kinkade's style was very textured and stylized, not so much realistic in its depictions as it was dream-like, and when he painted his works they were realtively smaller in size. When I came across Bierstadt's works on person--these towering 10'x25' paintings--I knew that I would have so much with which to work and that his dramatic nature scenes were far better suited to my tastes, both as an observer of art and an (at the time) potential thief. Being larger paintings in real life, the resolution of the digital images I would be able to work with were inherently larger as well, leaving much more room for detail and blown-up creativity, which defines the ideal candidate of a photoshop base.

 

 

My scene builds off of the base of this (in my opinion) fairly empty painting, which seemed to rely on the sheer scale of the nature depicted as its core strength. Naturally, I filled in every empty space in the painting that I could with new subject material from the universe most unrelated--more Star Wars. After about 6 hours of toil, I had successfully transferred, resized, color graded and textured (1) AT-AT, (2) AT-STs, (3) X-Wings, (2) TIE Fighters, (3) Star Destroyers and (1) new planet, along with laser effects and water modifications to "correct" the new environment. My finished product was not a mimickery of the Bennett photoshops (which I feared it might), but rather its own new and original work that I was proud of and enjoyed printing. I made two prints of this piece, both 25"x40", and framed only one, which now resides in my home in my gaming cave, while the other hangs on the wall of my high school art mentor's classroom.

DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.
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DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.