Eye of the Storm

Now the moment you have all been waiting for - the big reveal...

Eye of the Storm  (Brian Morgan 2015)

After playing with several ideas and the concepts, I finally chose to create my photo montage based on the Eye of the Storm concept.  If you recall from the post last week, this was one of the sketches associated with this fictitious band:

Eye of the Storm Concept drawing

 Out of the all of the concepts, this is one of the ones that stood out to me, and so I started looking for photos to help build out the concept and create a montage from it.  The first thing I needed was tornado, and after viewing hundreds of tornado photos, I settled on this one:

Credit: Justin1569 at en.wikipedia [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)  via Wikimedia Commons

Once the tornado was established, it was time to look for a building that might work.  I wanted something close to the image I had in my head, and after over an hour of searching, I found this photo of the old Tampa stadium when it was being torn down.

Credit: Zeng8r at en.wikipedia [CC BY 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Next, I needed some more smoke to help bring out the destruction caused by the tornado.  I chose to use the following cloud picture as the highlights would add depth:

Credit: Public Domain Image (No attribution required)

Next, I needed an eye to represent the "eye" of the storm.  I selected the eye from this image:

Credit: "Elod-Eye" by Frédéric DUPONT is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0.

Although the original concept did not have lightning or rain, I decided to add them in lieu of the instruments as the additional storm characteristics also help display the emotions associated with this band's music, and the instruments took away from the image.  As such, I added the following two images:

Credit: "Night lightning" By Valerie Everett [CC BY-SA 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/)] via flickr

Credit: Devon Coker via qbrushes.net

To top off the concept, I added a banner at the top with the band's name along with two adjustment layers, and effects associated with a few of the image portions. The resulting image turned out pretty close to what I had in the head.

Here is a larger image of the final design: