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My Infiniti Design Competition Final Entry

Some of you may remember a few weeks back when I posted that I would be entering the Infiniti Digital Art Competition. Well the deadline time has arrived and I’ve completed my entry!

A Recap of the Competition Brief:

For those of you who didn’t see the original post, the basics of the Infiniti brief are as follows:

The contest theme is ‘inspired performance’. The heroes of the design must be Infiniti’s cars. The brief is really quite broad, which was great because it gave me quite a lot of creative freedom.

Straight off the mark ‘inspired performance’ evoked images of professional dancers. As well as following the theme closely, dancers seemed to be a perfect visual evocation of the Infiniti brand. Dancers are after all, powerful, fast, strong, and have grace and poise. All of these qualities are shared by the Infiniti brand.

Anyway, enough chit chat! Here’s a look at my final composition:

Broad Aims for the Composition:

My primary aim for the design was to smoothly integrate the dancers with an Infiniti car model. Rather than overlay them in a way that made them feel separate, I almost wanted the car to be part of their dance. This way the qualities of both dancers and Infiniti cars would fuse in a stunning display.

Therefore, whilst the car is the central focus of my design, the dancers are clearly responding to it with a visual display. As the dancers jump towards the car they seem drawn to it’s charms, almost in some kind of ritualistic worship.

The weaving fabric trailing from each dancer serves to bring the composition together, as the fabric envelopes around the dancers and car. The fabric also accentuates the purple brand color associated with Infiniti, and provides a nice splash of color.

Some of the Challenges and Boundaries of the Design:

I can honestly say that this is the most effort I’ve put into a digital design. It was really refreshing to have a decent amount of time to work on my entry. Usually I’m forced to condense the amount of time I spend on my tutorial designs, in order to get them out to you guys. However, I could really put in some proper time with this composition, and therefore could make it a lot more detailed.

For instance, here are some facts about the design:

- The original composition is several thousand pixels wide (so really high-res)
- The design consists of well over 100 Photoshop layers
- The original file stands at over 1GB! (Hence Photoshop was struggling by the end of it haha).

Some Close Ups and Analysis:

Now let’s look at some close ups of the design, and I’ll explain my thinking behind various aspects, as well as some of the techniques used:

The above image isn’t a close up, this is the actual size of the composition (told you it was huge!). Working at such a high res, with the potential for the design to be displayed at a public exhibition, I had to spend far more time than use in extracting my images. A lot of time went into extracting images (particularly the female dancers with all their hair!).

The above close up shows another aspect of working with such a high-res image – detail. I really spent the extra time on the details of this piece. You can see part of the distant mountain range background in the image above. Asides from blending over 10 images for the main background (including multiply cloud patterns, moons, lots of mountains etc…) I integrated subtle features like bird formations and a really faint northern lights effect to add an element of the magical.

A big part of my design was capturing motion. Clearly the Infiniti car and the dancers are fast and agile, and the trick was capturing this movement visually. It wasn’t as simple as whacking on a motion blur, and I ended up applying dozens of various tricks to show motion happening. You can see some of these above. With this design I really focused on layering up effects, rather than slapping on something too obvious.

Quite a unique aspect of my design was integrating visual elements of Infiniti car models into the broader design. For example, the abstract ground structure which the car is set upon is actually constructed of several grill frontings from the Infiniti car range. The idea is to fully integrate Infiniti cars into the full ‘world’ of the design, rather than just the actual central car model. This helps create a more complete brand, and emphasises the stunning design features of the range (for example, the sleek, curving lines of the grills).

Final Thoughts:

Overall, however I do in the competition, this composition was a lot of fun. It’s really pushed my Photoshop skills and it’s been a bit of a learning curve as well working on such a large scale. 

It’s great to experiment with lighting, blending and movement to such an extent.

I would absolutely love to know what you all think of the design and the thought process behind it. I also encourage you all to get involved with design competitions, particularly DesignBoom as they’ve seemed fantastic so far!

Infiniti
Digital Art Competition

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About the Author:

Tom is the founder of PSDFAN. He loves writing tutorials, learning more about design and interacting with the community. On a more interesting note he can also play guitar hero drunk with his teeth.

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9 Comments:

  1. burnego says:

    Hi. First of all, congratulations for your great job on this website. Second, regarding your design: it’s a good piece of work and it looks good, but… I think you should work a little more on the car shadows. It looks like it’s floating around. Maybe you could burn a little more, or you could try just to remove them and add a zoom blur to the car so it gives a high speed effect(it’s just an opinion). Anyway, good luck in the competition!

  2. Crazyhunk says:

    great job on the piece Tom, like it.
    Though I must add, do not mind – I am not a good artist as yourself, I feel something missing / feels out of place in the final piece.
    Though this could just be me, and as I said I am not a good artist as you.

    Nonetheless a good piece & best of luck Tom

  3. Love the idea and details you put in the work, but one thing I really can’t figure out is wheter or not the wheels should be moving aswell, as it is in motion.

  4. ricardofx says:

    hi champ :D
    nice entry dude,just take care with the wheels and car shadows.this is just my opiniom champ you´re the boss.
    best wishes XD

  5. Lj says:

    All your efforts and hard work in this site and your creation are amazing to me. Thanks for all of it and Best wishes to you in the competition!

  6. Su Hall says:

    Tom, this is amazing! Your effort really shows through! You’re doing an awesome job! Congrats and Good wishes for you in the competition! I thought your thought processes were intriguing. Particularly the explanation where you used the grill frontings in the surface area. Your reasoning is neat! The reference of the dancers with the car is nice, too! It works for me!
    Good job!
    Su

  7. Eric Vasquez says:

    Hey Tom! This looks like a pretty solid design for the competition. I like being able to read through your process and get some insight into some of the decisions you made and why you made them.

    In terms of composition, I think that there is a clear hierarchy and that the car is the main element here, which is good. The subtle use of the logo on the top doesn’t bother me because you can still see the Infiniti logo on the license plate.

    I like the addition of the dancers around the car, but I would be curious to see how it would look if the dancers weren’t quite as symmetrical – 3 on the left, 3 on the right, both along the same horizontal plane. It might also be interesting to see a bit of the purple ribbon coming in from somewhere along the top or the edges of the other corners of the image just to sort of complete that wrapped feeling that you start to get on the bottom of the design.

    That being said, your silhouettes look fantastic and the time you have taken for the details is evident. The motion works well throughout the piece although I have to agree that the wheels should also be treated a bit to show them in motion. This could be as simple as selecting just the tires and applying a bit of a blur or something to that effect, but it’s just a minor detail.

    Overall I like the design and think you have definitely gone above and beyond the design brief. You’re Photoshop skills continue to improve and I wish you the absolute best in the competition!

  8. Tom says:

    Wow, thanks for all the great feedback guys. I’ll respond to you all in one blanket post, as it seems a little impractical to leave 7 different comment responses :) .

    First of all, the constructive criticism is great. I agree about the wheels in motion, and think that could add a lot of movement and energy to the piece. As for the shadows under the car without them the image actually looked a lot flatter, so I do think they need to be there. Of course they could probably be worked on some more though.

    I actually think that the contest works whereby those shortlisted get 2 months to refine/finish their entry/concept, so if this is the case and I’m lucky enough to make it I could work on improving the design, and take on board all your great suggestions.

    Thanks again for the fantastic comments everyone, and fingers crossed now for the judging process :) .

  9. Maria says:

    Tom, The design looks sexy! You rock man :)

    Best wishes from Maria.

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