Pi Day, the latest holiday creation from Kitchen Sink Creative Group, is a good example of how the combination of different elements and techniques creates a unique and effective composition.

Jean’s vision was to have a group of people in a field celebrating Pi Day; unfortunately, we had no Pi Day celebration planned, and we had no idea where to find a pi monolith to put into our back yard. So began the imagination process. Ultimately, the finished piece was an amalgam of three basic elements: stock photography, digital illustration, and custom photography.

Jean first selected a background for her image. She selected a number of images that fit our criteria (sunny, spring-like, fairly open) from istockphoto.com. We eventually chose an image from Antonio Nunes.

Once the background image was chosen, Jean began work on the pi monolith in Strata 3D. She created several different monoliths, including a silver one (she liked it best but the contrast was all wrong) and one or two psychedelic ones (it seemed like overkill; the image is trippy enough)!

The pi was originally created with a brushed silver skin, but it was so smooth and slick it didn't look natural. To overcome this, Jean created a bump map – essentially a black and white image where the white comes forward and the black areas recess. This gives the pi image its “pitted” look.

Once she finished the pi image in Strata 3D, she did some work in Photoshop, adding some “stepping stones” to suggest a way of getting to the top of the object.

Now we were left to find people to celebrate in the photo. Because we were including Einstein in the image (it was his birthday too), we figured we could get away with duplicates with our models (time travel and all that, you know). We gathered friends and family, as well as a number of critters from around the house (special thanks to Wookie, Keefer, and Mango) for a photo shoot. During the shoot, we paid close attention to lighting and positioning to help reduce the amount of manipulation required once the pictures were in digital format.

The majority of the images were taken around our house in Homewood, shooting on film using a Minolta X7-A SLR camera and a 35-75mm zoom lens. We also used a few shots taken with an HP Photosmart M407 digital camera. The film shots were developed and the negatives scanned to CD; shots taken with the digital camera were uploaded directly to the computer.

Jean merged the background and pi images to create a scene with a natural appearance, then began some basic composition with the people and animals within the scene. Using Photoshop, she made all the necessary adjustments to each of the figures to maximize the realism of the scene. Photoshop was also where she essentially drew in the Einstein cloud face.

The result is an image we think exemplifies a celebration of Pi Day, and we look forward to making many more!