Deliverables

BRIEF:
The brief for this project was to create an album cover inspired by the name “Glass Jenga”. With the goal being to create a final image that looks as realistic as possible, while using as few assets as possible.

HOW I MADE IT:
I began this project like most, by finding some assets on google images, these being a simple glass texture and wood plank texture. I then found an image of a real Jenga brick and traced it with the pen tool, before masking the glass texture to it. Then I duplicated my newly made Jenga piece a few thousand times, placing each duplicate to create an unfinished tower. After all of the duplicates were placed, I reduced the opacity of each piece to create a realistic translucent glass effect. Once that was done I spent a few hours creating exposure masks on each piece, to give them accurate shadows and highlights. This portion of creating was by far the most tedious, as it took a lot of trial and error to make the shadows look right, especially since light interacts with glass differently to normal materials. Once the tower was looking good, I moved onto the surroundings using exposure masks to add shadows to the background and wood below the tower. This help tons in adding some realism and depth to the scene.

With the main image finished I grabbed some light ray overlays from google and began placing them throughout the scene to simulate how light would actually look passing through a tower of glass Jenga pieces. This part was especially satisfying as it really made the image glow.
Finally, I used a Camera Raw filter to color grade and bring up the clarity of the entire image. This was by far my favorite section of creating as I feel like it improves the image so much with little to no effort.
I also want to add that this description is a brief summary of the project and not a detailed step by step tutorial, as there were a lot of extra things I did throughout the project that I can’t cover without making this description thousands of words long.

SOFTWARE USED:

• Adobe Photoshop
• Google Images