Christopher Walken

The Deer Hunter is one of my favourite films. It stars my two favourite actors Robert De Niro and Christopher Walken. So I wanted to do a piece on the infamous roulette scene with Christopher walken and try to do him justice.

I started by finding a suitable frame from the film.

I added a new layer above the image and carefully lined the details using the pen tool and stoke path combination.

This was the outcome.

Using the magic wand tool to isolate the certain areas, I coloured and toned the image using the brush tool and the blend tool.

This was how it looked after i had completed colouring and adding tone to my piece.

I used separate layers to colour most sections of the character, this way I could keep good control and not colour outside my line work.

Using the Film Grain filter, and added noise and texture to the character.

I felt the image was too wide and there would be too much empty space. Empty space can be useful sometimes to communicate a certain feeling, but with this piece I wanted the viewer to focus on the main character of the piece and show that this was all about 'what was going on in his head'. So I cropped the image suitably.  

Using the Brush tool I added a colour theme to the background.

I added a filter to round the shape paths and block the colours in a certain way to give a wooden feel.

I then added another filter to add noise and texture to the background. I wanted it to feel as busy as it is in the scene of the film, but also keep the focus on Walken and draw no attention away from him. So i kept the colours quite tertiary and dark. 

After completing my background, I used the lasso tool to loosely map around the edges od my character...

I used this to then lighten the space behind him, bringing him further forward form the background again. Also I feel this effect looks quite abstract, which was my intention as the rest of the piece is fairly abstract and the emotions felt whilst watching this scene are also somewhat bizarre.

I would of been happy with my final outcome, but I feel now if I was to do it again I could do it a lot better given the skills I have picked up digitally during this project.