Older Work Part 8: Batman In Classic Art From Something Awful
These couple images, along with many others in the same Somethingawful.com thread, spread relatively wide on the internet, becoming front page features on the aforementioned site, and having their image tags scraped off them to be posted by plagiarists on various other web pages. My username on those forums was caldrax and I posted several photoshops there, ranging between sloppy and funny, very authentic looking and unfunny, and sloppy and unfunny. These were a couple of the more technically adept ones, though the hilarity factor was low. I also did several potentially offensive ones, which may or may not be shared here, depending on how much I decide I care for my reputation.
The first image was the famed M.C. Escher, retouched to look like the Penguin. It was surprisingly easy to do, I simply cut and pasted in the Penguin’s face and layered on the texture used in the rest of the image to make it fit in. The source photo of the penguin already had a look of bulbousness about it, so I didn’t need to do any reshaping to match the spherical nature of the rest of the Escher image. It came out looking like it had been harder to create than it had, which is always nice.
The second image was harder to achieve, yet not as widely found to be amusing (Isn’t that always how it goes). Color is always trickier, and a lot of layering, clone tool, and various forms of trickery were used. Removing the old gigantic comb from the original Magritte (this may not be the exact image I used-there were several reproduction versions) proved to be the most difficult part, and placing the shadow was equally tricky. I was proud of the way that part ended up looking, and the wall behind it came out pretty nice as well. I must confess, however, that I was frustrated at being unable to find a batarang that looked exactly like what I was going for.
The thread inspired some really great photoshops (and some not so great ones), I recommend looking over the highlights that were later posted on Somethingawful.
Tags: batman, caldrax, escher, magritte, penguin, Photoshop, sa, something awful
