This picture represents how I feel about my biggest challenges in life.
It seems like a heroic moment diving head first into the fight with guns blazing against insurmountable odds. But for me so far, many times, the monster wins. It makes sense. The monster is bigger, badder, and pretty near invincible. As cool as the guns are, they don't really do much in comparison to a fire breathing hell beast. So I made this picture to remind myself of all those times in my life. Because sometimes being brave means going even when I know I'm going to fail. Fail in Glory. I used to think it meant if I'd keep going when it was scary like that, I'd win. Nope. But I still go. It's the only way to ever live with yourself.
I took this picture randomly as I walked up the street in Salt Lake. Later on I had the idea to add a giant animal into the scene that I could make look like a monster attacking the city. So I took a trip to a life science museum with a lot of taxidermy mounts and took pictures of everything. The bear really got my mind going though so that was the one I decided to work with. I had this idea to add horns to its head since its a monster and not just a giant bear. I took the horns off a couple different antelope type deer and using liquify, transform, and the paint brush for some of it, I turned two pairs of horns into three. I did a shoot with my car to try and get the perspective right to add that in. Then I went in the backyard and did several shots of myself with a few nerf guns painted black to composite in. I tried swords too but I liked the idea of trying to create smoke and flashes for the guns along with shell casings. I used liquify to beef up and morph my grizzly, especially the mouth and face. There was a lot of work masking and blending edges so that everything would feel like it was living in the same space. I added brake lights to the white Jeep in the foreground and added a crushed up car to the ground just below the monster's paw. The burning eyes were an experiment that worked out better than I thought. I painted some lighting layers in to make the flares look like they were effecting the face of the bear as well as some shafts of light coming down toward me. There's a subtle anamorphic flare I created with a few layers as well. The sky was a panorama I took on my phone one night. I mixed it a few different ways to put the sunset in the right place. I added smoke layers between the element layers to create more depth. The flash to the gun took a few tries, but I finally got it where I liked it. There's a few other lighting layers to add highlights and reflections to the teeth, tongue and snout of the hell beast since the gun is right there in front of him. There's a lot of shadow work as well everywhere to sink all the elements into the street.
After all that, I did a final global pass for color. I darkened it down quite a bit, and then toned it all Hollywood for fun.
It was a lot of work, but I did it all in my spare time. Never felt like work I guess even though I didn't ever seem to have enough time to sink into it. The frustrating part was wanting to share the idea, but anyone I showed it to was kind of put off by how the lighting and color didn't match between all the elements. Not until the final few days could I show anyone and have them actually get impressed by it.