Picture of the Day: Landfall

Artist Erik Johnansson (featured previously) has unveiled his latest artwork entitled, Landfall. While Johansson is well-known for his incredible Photoshop and retouching skills, the artist is an adept photographer and you might not realize the amount of ‘analog’ work that went into creating this piece.

On his blog, Erik explains:

“About a year ago I shot the first material to the image that would become Landfall. Although the final image contains about 230 layers it didn’t take me a year to make it. Instead I learned that liquid is very hard to work with. I wanted this image to turn out as realistic as possible and therefore I knew that I had to build a model of the scene and actually apply liquid to it. I do spend a lot time in photoshop but I always try to capture as much as I can in camera.
 
I photographed a landscape from a silo in July last year, I always like getting up a bit for landscape photos to see more of the ground and get a good overview of the scene. I then build a copy of the location using some cardboard boxes I had at home. I used a mixture of flour, water, coconut flakes and food coloring to make the grass turn into liquid. It turned out a bit more cyan/turquoise than green but I ran out of green food coloring and had to use blue as well. In the end color is pretty easy to change in Photoshop, light and perspective isn’t! [source]

Embedded below is a behind the scenes video of the making of Landfall. You can add video editing to Johnasson’s growing list of skills 🙂 If you’re interested in prints, they are available here.