I’m reading this book about physics and cosmology that inspired me to do this space arrangement.

Again, I used Photoshop, a very little bit of Illustrator and sourced plenty of pictures all around the web. Again, we’ll see the importance of having a lot of details, in combination with Blending modes usage.

Even before I opened my Photoshop, I spent serious amount of time browsing around and looking for pictures. Some I found on purpose, some I found by accident. After I took a long look at what I found and roughly sorted out what I’m gonna do in terms of composition. 

 

 I started with the bunch of physicist around Albert. Cut them out, one by one using pen tool. 

Next thing, replace their heads with sand timers.  I found this sand timer picture I cut out, inverted and desaturated.

The top bit is obviously wrong for what I need, so I drew the rest of a shape with pen and filled it using stamp tool and put on place.

I did that for all the scientists. You can see that the conection between the timer and the suit is a bit rough. So I added a bit of a shadow - using masks and brush tool.

Ok, scientists are fixed. I scaled them down a bit so Albert has more dominant position, desaturated them and placed a starfield background behind them.

Then I started adding details. Ruler, monkey, watch, etc

It’s important to add as much details as possible to make it look less flat.

Then I added the flying vehicles, they are brilliant as they have interesting perspective - I arranged them to look like they are coming from the middle of the composition.

… where I added a nice little galaxy - just desaturated picture I found on google images and used it with “Screen” blending mode. I also added “Outer Glow” layer style to those vehicles to make them stand out a bit more.
It was shaping up nicely, it just needed a bit of Albert over the whole thing.

I used this in high res, put it above all other layers and set blending mode to “Overlay” - this makes it look much more dramatic.

To add some color in, I used turquoise triangles I prepared in Illustrator. Here I used my favourite “Transform each” function. First I drew a couple of triangles of different sizes. Duplicated them around a page, selected and used “Transform Each”.

Transform Each can randomly scale, rotate and move each of selected objects. Copied them over to Photoshop, used Color Fill layer effect with Overlay blending mode. 

Finally I added the “title treatment” and sharpen the whole thing.

It’s important to notice that before I placed the galaxy and Albert’s head on top of everything else, the whole thing looked a bit flat, unappealing and somehow not right. All objects looked like they were cut out from different documents and it lacked something that would connect them together in one visual. Big bitmap full of details that is placed above the whole composition with some blending mode usually does the trick.     

Any questions or comments, let me know.

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