Aside from my Riddick/Jack attempts at photomanips, I did some other stuff with images that I’m pleased with, including two that became popular memes for about fifteen minutes. There’s not much here, but I’m proud of these.
Oh, I’m proud of this one! It was created out of several fun images, including a picture of a little girl “driving” a Hello Kitty bumper car in a parking lot. The Riddick in the picture was actually “assembled” from several different images of Vin Diesel portraying Riddick, in order to get the right look and posture. Then I needed to position him on a background in a way that looked somewhat convincing. I was very pleased with the results, so it’s one of my favorites.
One of the things that always made us a little cranky on RGFC was the sheer scarcity of pictures of Rhiana Griffith for our fan artists to use. So whenever we got our hands on new media she was in, we rejoiced. Well, when she guest-starred on “All Saints,” it was really cool… except she was portraying a young prostitute who had been viciously brutalized by a client, and her character was covered in bruises. That didn’t exactly give us good new bases for fan art… so I began experimenting with seeing if I could erase the bruises from an image and create a restored face that would be great as a base for further art. It was an hours-long process (I’m sure applying the bruise makeup was a lot faster!) but I was pretty pleased by the ultimate results.
I wish I could remember all of the details, but this started with a post on LiveJournal (back in its heyday before it imploded and became — literally — a Russian asset) when, as part of a very strange conversation, someone described a desire for an image with Darth Vader wearing “a purple pimp hat.” I can no longer remember why, but the discussion got wilder and wilder and I found myself off searching for useful images to make this a reality. After finding a pastel Hello Kitty Vader online, I began adjusting colors and decorating him… and this was the result. I was especially gratified when, several months after I’d let Bling Vader loose into the wilds of the Internet, he showed up during a meme frenzy on another discussion I was watching. ❤️