Rule of Thirds

Created for the 'New Year, New Hunt' round of the scavaneger hunt.

Concept

The idea for the Rule of Thirds picture came while I was working with the crop grid in Snapseed. My first idea was to just have the grid slightly cut the skin.
To verify the concept I did a quick mock/prototype image in Snapseed/Sketchbook to see if the concept would look convincing at all. That's what you see in the first image. The Image was taken at the busstop with the tablet's camera, blood is hand painted. Looks ugly but convinced me that it could work. It also showed that if I overlayed the crop grid, the blood didn't need to be too accurate,

I remembered the scene from cube and had a look at it to see how they did the cutlines. Seems they just painted the blood on the face.

Fake Blood

Since I obviously didn't want to cut my face I decided to use fake blood paint. I used a piece of string to create the straight lines on my face. Using the concept picture as a reference, to see where the lines should be.
Then I set up an improvised studio in the kitchen using my speedlight and a white cardboard as a reflector to get a sharp evenly lit portrait.

Postprocessing

Then I started to postprocess the picture in #gimp . I inserted a rendered image of a cube, again to conceptualize the look and added the grid lines, which come from one of Gimp's built in filters.

Background

Since I wanted everything in my pictures to at least go once through my camera I needed to take care of the background:
I painted a cube like design in Inkscape (like Illustrator, but free) - printed it and built a little cardboard cube. Since I was going to blur it again, it didn't need to be too accurate. And as you can see when I lit it up with the flashlight it looked like the real thing! Yeah!

The pieces are falling - apart!

Then I started to play around and came up with the pieces in the progress of falling; I liked the idea, but it didn't look right - there had to be something between the pieces. And as much as the fake blood looked real as it flowed over my skin, the cuts still didn't look right.

Wiener Wurst

To the rescue came the Wiener Wurst ("Vienna sausages") which has a skin like color. First I made a small incision and filled it with ketchup and took a picture of that. This I used multiple times along the closed cut lines.
To get the right look for the falling pieces I cut completely through the Wurst and placed it in front of the cube; again illuminated by the speedlight. That way the look through the cuts had a "realistic" light situation. I reused the picture of the cut multiple times (transformed and warped) to fill the space between the falling pieces.
Final touch up was done in Lightroom again.

What I Learned!

A lot about Gimp :-)
Apart from that I think that verifying a concept in a quick prototype helps a lot to decide if it's worth pursuing an idea or not. I did the same for my Careless cigarette shot, where I shamelessly used pictures from Google's image search in my quick prototype to define the mood that my final image should have.

I am really happy with my final Rule Of Thirds picture and hope that you liked this little insight into my creative process.