The Lakeside

“The Lakeside” digital composition went through a gradual evolution before it was finalized in its current composition. Above you see the first versions of the retro painting when it was created back in 2010. The artwork was initially intended to be a vertical composition and it was among my pieces submitted for the Orange County Traffic Competition. I made these pieces under Professor Rob Reedy, who always had an awesome knack for the use of color and design principles in a composition. At the time I chose to apply an additive color scheme of reds, greens, and blues for the primary hues. I wanted the colors to reflect a retro inspired atmosphere of a forest or an urban park in the middle of the city. The transparent colors and over lapping shapes were created through Toon Boom Studio and Adobe Photoshop. Afterward the starburst effect was added through the Sony Vegas software.

The piece to the left would have been the final version had I not continued playing around with the Hue/Saturation filter on Photoshop. While the piece was fine as it was I still wanted to see what it would look like if the colors were altered in some other way. At some point I changed the hue to its most extreme on the left side and eureka! That is how I got the color scheme you see above to the right. As soon as I saw that I realized it was the color scheme I wanted for the piece. It would be this version that would appear on my Traffic Box model for the competition. In hindsight I am glad I made that change because the piece got an extra kick in color and it better captured the timeless retro feel I was looking for. Because it was my favorite piece from the competition I decided to repurpose it as an animation background called "The Metropolis", but that is a subject for another post.