The goal of this assignment was to choose a contemporary artist, and recreate a portrait of them through digital collage in Photoshop. I chose Wenting Zhu, the lead science artists at the Beauty of Science Collective, which focuses on “creating projects that blend art and science.” (https://www.beautyofscience.com/about) I tried to select artworks from a variety of projects that she has worked on, based on her online portfolio-but there are many more on the website that I encourage others to check out! The images below are from “Crystal Gardens”, “The Rise of Mold,” and “The Vibrancy”. The first two are fairly self explanatory. “The Vibrancy” uses polarized light microscopy to capture the crystallization process of various materials. I plan to incorporate the organic shapes and vibrant colors into the final portrait. There weren’t many photos available to choose from, but I thought this would one would be a good “blank slate,” with a pretty simple color-blocking to follow the main shapes.

https://www.beautyofscience.com

https://www.envisioningchemistry.com/

This is a condensed collection of videos that Beauty of Science has worked on.

https://www.behance.net/WENTINGZHU?locale=en_US

(This is Wenting Zhu’s profile on Behance, where she has her portfolio posted.)

For my fist draft, I focused on her microphotographic work, which is focused on exploring different biological and chemical processes. I used examples of her work here, drawing from “Crystal Gardens,” “Flowers&Colors,” “The Vibrancy,” and “Microvistas.” (All of these can be found both on the Beauty of Science website and Zhu’s Behance profile.) I basically just isolated each feature of the original portrait and then added a clipping mask with one of her artworks on top of it. After that, I went back in and added some adjustment layers for color/saturation. I also added some “airbrushing” to bring back some dimension that got lost through the clipping layers. Besides Zhu’s work, I used an Adobe Stock frame and a public use photo from the Hubble telescope. I added some effects to the background layers, including some drop shadows and glow effects to crecate more depth. Overall I’m pretty happy with how it turned out, but I think the face could still use some more detailed reshading, particularly around the nose.

For my final compoistion, I took a classmates advice on lowering the brightness and increasing the contrast on her face. In addition, I airbrushed on some shadows that I thought were missing. I also added higher quality images of her crystal gardens, and more details from her ionization photgraphy. For a final touch, I also added a free stock image of glitter as a clipping mask over the gold frame.