Have you ever found yourself watching a bad movie, perhaps late at night, and known that you should switch over, or switch off and find something more useful to do, like sleep? Do you ever hear yourself arguing with that little voice who is telling you to turn it off? ‘Give it a bit longer, it will probably get better’, but eventually you find yourself staring at the rolling credits knowing that you’ve just wasted 90 minutes of your life and you won’t get them back. A similar thing happened to me last night while I was creating an Aston Villa wallpaper.

Someone asked me yesterday when I would be uploading a wallpaper celebrating Villa’s victory over Man Utd at Old Trafford, which was a great question. If any game deserves enshrining in a wallpaper it’s that one, right? Well, not quite. It turns out that’s not exactly how I work. To be fair, I already knew this.

I just wasn’t feeling anything beside the result jumping out at me about the game, but on the basis of the other wallpapers on the Games Page, I agreed ‘Man Utd 0 Aston Villa 1’ should be among them. So I sat down after dinner with the intention of creating something I could have finished and published for this morning. It didn’t pan out that way, here’s what happened…

A Blank Canvas

Firstly, when you don’t have a clear idea in your mind about what you want to create, a vision if you will, you’re going to fail unless a eureka moment strikes. That can happen, but this time it didn’t.

I decided to create a fairly generic background featuring the inside of Old Trafford. By the time I’d masked out what I didn’t want, ran a few filters and layered in some textures it was looking something like this:-

It might not be easy to see at this resolution, but that’s not a bad start. The original was at 1280×1024 resolution, but next I placed that inside a 1920×1200 image. I won’t bore you with the technical reasons for this, but take my word for it, it’s a good practice.

After I’d done that, the 1920×1200 version became my full sized canvas, so I began layering in more textures and patterns that will act as fillers in certain resolutions, but would be cropped out of others. It looked like this:-

Again, you probably can’t see at this resolution, but I’ve blended in a grid pattern and there’s also a really horrible 1960’s wallpaper image in there. And by that I mean the real kind of wallpaper that your Gran probably had hanging on the wall of her spare room. Maybe she still does?

Now this wasn’t the final product at all, but I still wasn’t feeling much from it so I decided that I’d get on with the foreground. If I had a real killer foreground, the lacklustre background won’t get noticed. Once again though, I have to stress that if you don’t have that vision of what you’re trying to achieve it really becomes a laborious process looking for inspiration.

In retrospect, some sort of play on this image below, or one from around that moment, would have been ideal.

However, that kind of image demands high resolution and despite this game featuring Man Utd at Old Trafford, I didn’t have a single high resolution image from the game. Not one and I still don’t. Rightly or wrongly I decided to work with this image of Gabby & Ash celebrating with Heskey & Milner about to join them:-

I didn’t like the composition though, so here’s where I started to get creative and a little bit conceptual. I thought that Ash & Gabby should be the focus, but I wanted to frame them between Milner & Heskey in the foreground, but out of focus. In order to do this, one of them would need flipping into a mirror image or they would appear to be running away from Gabby & Ash.

It was easiest to do this with Heskey as only the number 18 on his shorts would betray what I’d done and that was easy to clone out.

I should point out that at this stage the four players were arranged in much the same way, but were actually on the right hand side of the wallpaper. I only moved them later.

I wasn’t sure, but I thought I might finally be onto something here and I was creating something I’d not tried before, which, in a fashion, is an augmented reality. Although what you were seeing in the image did happen, it wasn’t quite as you see it and I’m also portraying it from an angle that no camera was likely to have caught.

Then I started to get carried away and thought it might be fun to place Alex Ferguson berating the fourth official in the background, suitably out of focus to make it look like a real scene. Of course, it didn’t happen like this, but I thought it could be a clever way to represent a couple of events from the game in a single snapshot.

Unfortunately that started a mental wrestling match over the image of Old Trafford in the background. Would people believe that I was trying to make the whole image look like it was happening inside Old Trafford, but the stadium and pitch were out of perspective so it would just look like a massive pile of fail?

It struck me that it wasn’t such a bad idea to search out an image inside the stadium that was close enough to perspective that with a bit of manipulation…. on the other hand, I could spend half an hour looking and find nothing. Or, I could find something, spend an hour or so messing around and still fail.

Sir Alex was promptly removed, but by now the seeds of conceptual art were well and truly sown and gestating in my mind. Despite the ‘bad movie voice’ starting to whisper in my ear, I began imagining the very ground beneath our Villa heroes’ feet breaking up under the historical significance of the win.

Before I knew it, I was undoing all the work that went into the background by layering in pyroclastic flows and explosions over the top. But that wasn’t working out, so, stuck on the apocalyptic theme, I roughly chopped in some lava flows and volcanic eruptions as shown below.

I finally had a vision! I could see explosions, fire, lava, smoke, lightning and rain. I could imagine the world apparently coming to an end as Aston Villa finally beat Man Utd on their own turf. It might not look all that great at the time, but I was convinced that I could make it work…

…and then I heard that little voice telling me I was watching a ‘B’ movie and a bad one at that. I looked at the clock and decided it was time to turn this rubbish off and go to bed.

A New Day, A Fresh Start

Regular readers will know that there’s been plenty of times when I’ve found an unfinished project on my computer, finished it off and uploaded it for their desktop pleasure. It wasn’t with misplaced confidence, therefore, that I fired up the the old computer this morning expecting my fresh set of eyes to see some real potential in my Old Trafford wallpaper. I didn’t though, I only saw pure fail.

Still, seeing the funny side, I decided to Tweet about it. You know, like you do. @twofootedtackle goaded me into showing my work. Well, ‘goaded’ might be a tad overstating things, but he did use an exclamation mark which I interpreted as something of a dare. Perhaps not a ‘double dog dare’, but he’s a decent enough chap, so I didn’t see the harm in letting him have a sneaky peak.

Call me naive, Twitter is a public arena after all, but I wasn’t expecting him to share it with all of his followers. Apparently more than 70 people had a gander at it, so thanks for that Chris!!

Then it occurred to me that it could be a nice personal touch to let those of you who like my work in to see my failures…. and there’s no shortage there, believe me.

So genuinely, thanks to @twofootedtackle for the inspiration, hopefully you’ve enjoyed this peak behind the curtain at something that’s turned out to be a bit of a train wreck. In Part II, which I will publish tomorrow (Friday), I’ll take you on a quick tour of some other projects that didn’t make the cut, but somehow survived the delete key over the last couple of years. Don’t worry, it won’t be as in depth as this, but when I had a look around the hard drive, I actually found it quite an interesting journey. I hope you will too.

And as a final thought, this is just one reason why I don’t do requests, so don’t ask!! 😉