Three completely new unseen portraits from the ‘3D Glass Smash’ METAL HAMMER cover shoot.
The last few Limited Edition print runs I have done of MOA, SU, and YUI sold out in record time and I regularly receive emails asking for more – especially YUI! I only decided to release these portraits because they have never been seen before and the eye contact and poses in each portrait work so well. After producing the Hateful 8 series of prints featuring OZZY, SLASH, GHOST, A7X, METALLICA, TONY IOMMI, AC/DC, I have been working on a few other portraits from my archive just for printing. These 3 prints came about after I was experimenting with the Tokyo Dot effect on a portrait of Dave Grohl. It looked stunning but the colour scheme just didn’t look right on the Foo Fighters frontman. BABYMETAL was the obvious choice. Unfortunately what I thought would be simple took over 3 days to reverse engineer from the Grohl portrait. The effect involves stripping the image down to separate tonal layers and preserving a master layer. I then replicate the background multiple times and overlay the Dot Screen. The process sounds simple but the effect is tailored to the specific image and what may work for one needs a different approach for another. The background layers are then multiplied and using ‘COLOUR DODGE’ and ‘SCREEN’ overlays, the background dot screen colours take on a life of their own depending on the tone and shading they are placed over. I then re-introduce the master image by using a layer mask to reveal the original beautiful portrait but preserving the background effects. The next step is to convert the image into the CMYK colour space and prepare the image for an 8 ink printing process.
These are made 100% with the print in mind and the images aren’t designed to be displayed on a computer screen. They come alive once printed and these 3 prints look so beautiful when admired on display. They are 20″x16′ (500mm x 400mm) and printed on the finest 100% cotton, heavyweight 330g paper. They are totally unique and I hope you are lucky enough to get one! At the time of writing this there are only 9 prints of each still available.
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