A shrinking world.

I can't remember where I found this image, but I did not make it and it does not belong to me. ;D

Communication is a wonderful thing and in terms of digital artwork, it can be portrayed in many ways. In my sketchpad I explored a few selections of how I could illustrate communication in my final piece.
One of my first mock ups in Photoshop were two postcards, as postcards are a form of long-distance communcation that is slowly dying out with the introduction of the internet.

Both of these images I took myself on holidays earlier in the year. I played around with colour levels and contrast as well as adding different overlays to create different effects.

HOWEVER...

The first thing that jumps in to my head when I think of "communication" is, admittedly, cyberspace. As we've moved slowly in to a digital era are lives are almost totally entwined with the internet. We shop on it, bank on it, socialise on it, make phone calls on it. We now have internet access in pubs and on our mobile phones. Photoshop can actually be very good at making some neat cyberspace effects, with simple tools like skewing that can create the cliché "parallell plane" type of image. I looked at a few existing images of cyberspace to research what type of effects would succeed in getting my piece to look "electronic".

 None of the above images were made by me, and all we found on google image so credit is to go were it is due. However, they served the purpose in showing me what type of layers make up a typical interpretation of cyberspace; wire frames, circuits, glowing lights, binary and pixels.

Expanding from a quick doodle in my sketchpad of a binary earth; (binary being the primary language for computer circuits) I whipped up a graphical image that expresses pretty much how I see cyberspace.

 

There is quite  a lot of effects going on in this image. My very first starting point was to create a layer of binary over a world map where the continents and landmasses were replaced with 1's and the water with 0's. Once it was complete, I selected a section and spherized it a few times, adding shadows as I went, to create a realistic sphere that is meant to represent a planet. 

The background is made up of several layers, the first being a painted world map which I painted myself using very saturated blues and greens. I also used the "Extrude" tool to create square blocks of different depths to represent pixels that make up visual displays on computers. As well as this, I included circuits which I texturised, pixellated and faceted white areas and a layer made up entirely of LCD pixels.