I’m on the Prowl…And I’m hungry like a Wolf

Screen shots taken from Season 2 Episode 11 of The Wire

No it’s not a bad 80’s song, it’s my The Wire Animal Human-Head Hybrid.  For this assignment I watched episode 11 of Season Two of The Wire to get a grasp on the character of Omar again.  For this particular episode the scene with Omar and Stringer Bell struck a chord inside of me.   In this particular scene, Stringer Bell “strings,” Omar along as he sets up Brother Mahmoud for the murder of Omar’s boyfriend Brandon.   Whilst Brother Mahmoud is trying to maintain Avon’s territory while he is in jail, Stringer Bell has other plans and has gone behind his back to collaborate with Prop Joe for better product.  However, Brother Mahmoud see’s other wise…clearly for Stringer Bell he is a problem that must be dealt with and why not send a Wolf to do a man’s work.   In the spirit of this, I created Omar-Lone Wolf because after all he works for himself, lives for himself and answers to no one.

This design assignment was very difficult for me, I had never really tried my hand at photoshop so it took me a while, I had to consult YouTube for a tutorial:

Which assisted me a lot because it pointed out the tools that I would need to use primarily which were:

• Lasso Tool
• Cut & Paste Tool
• Adobe Photoshop CC 2014

I had to download a trial version which by the way thank you Professor Groom for pointing this out.

 

The first few steps of which I had to do was I had to find two pictures that worked, I knew that I needed a wolf and I needed Omar however, I was looking for a very specific type of wolf a front facing wolf, and a clear picture of Omar with not too much clothing with more skin exposed so I could edit it without having to do too much cutting and pasting.

The first picture of Omar which I found was this from Wire Wiki Page

I then put that into photo shop and I cropped out some of his neckline and entire head and face.

Then I took a picture of a wolf which I Found from google images and placed it into a new sheet and pasted the cut out of Omar’s head on top the wolf in order to create layers.  I had to be careful during cutting and pasting that I did not cut out his original human ears with the picture as I wanted the Wolf Ears to take effect in the picture after I blotched in some fur.

While in there I added a reddish brown outline to cover the white empty space which was left after I ad cut out Omar’s head which were left after I omitted his ears.

I then used the warp tool to stretch Omar’s face over the wolf’s ..I then took the paint tool and matched the wolf’s fur color and I slowly went around and blotched in the fur color.  This was easier to do on the reddish brown background because it added a nice dark landscape to the back and help to blend the picture.  As a result Omar-Lone_Wolf was born.

 

While he is amateur at best, I really struggled with this , I started earlier in the week but am working through some designs.  I struggled to download Photoshop earlier and when I finally go through the technical errors the learning process was also a hard thing!

Design Thought Process

I would say the one thing about the design process is that you have to think when you are cutting and pasting things, you can’t just go in there blind.  Like for the Omar picture I had to think well, he won’t need his human ears if he is a wolf hybrid…so the way you want to mod your drawing is also important when creating these things. Otherwise this was one hell of  a learning process for me!