The requirements stated:
I looked at all the photos I had taken and realized that I didn't have a single picture of a moving car. They were all in parking lots or on the side of the road. The videos I had taken didn't show my car and if it did show a car it was the back of a car which I didn't believe would look right for this project. I then remembered Austin Caccavo did a video of Mark Benson which he used at Mark's memorial. I got permission to use a photo from the video Austin created. I would also like to get permission from the Benson family. If anyone has their contact information, please PM me.
- You must have already submitted an entry application for this year’s Melee
- Artwork must feature a Melee eligible car in an action pose, i.e. driver behind the wheel and apparently under motion. No static, driverless cars.
- Artwork must include the following information: (in no particular order) 2018; California Melee; XXII or 22.
- Artwork should be set up to print on a black shirt with white ink.
https://youtu.be/ymnYK1f2jck
Now that I had the photo it had to be turned into artwork with white ink on a black background. I fired up my 2005 version of Adobe Photoshop and got to work. First I had to remove the background. Before Parkinson's I would just use the eraser tool and freehand get rid of the background. Because of the tremor I ended up selecting large blocks of the background and deleting the blocks. Then I zoomed in and after a while I was able to get closer to the car. Unfortunately I had to remove the windshield.
Now that the background was removed from the photo I was left with a color photo of Mark Benson driving his works MGA. It had to be turned it into artwork using white ink. The next step was to change the mode of the photo to grayscale. That left me with a black and white photo that was mostly gray. After looking through the Filter Gallery and trying a bunch of filters I settled on the Photocopy filter which like old FAX machines and photocopiers produced a bad version of the car that was mostly white that worked for me.
The next step was to create a black background in another layer which left me with a bunch of white artifacts from the background that I had not deleted. After cleaning up the background and trimming closer to the car I created three different text versions and submitted them to the California Melee organizers. There where a number of submissions last year that they said:
I don't know if my version will be selected. It was fun doing and I felt productive doing it.We had many very excellent submissions for last year's contest and it was quite difficult for the Apparel Committee to make the final selection. Many of the submissions from last year could be updated/tuned up a bit and could possibly make the cut this year.
Today I thought maybe it could be used as a memorial.
Or if permission is obtained from the Benson family, here's a version without text.
Each version is designed for 8.5 x 11 inch paper. I could change that in my 13 year old version of Photoshop. The images in this post are not full size which I could provide.
What do you think?