While I worked at IBM, I met some pretty impressive people. A fellow contractor, Maria Masiar, recently achieved what I’d call deity status, having been to Adobe’s Photoshop Conference, also known as the Art Directors Invitational Master Class in San Francisco for two years, and both of those times, won prizes for her work during the conference (First Prize the first year). Maria, who moved here recently from Toronto, has now just had one of here projects here appear on Photoshop Magazine’s cover as a runner-up in the Fourth Annual Photoshop User Awards. Because I know the artist, I not only got a copy, but also the original photo that she used to produce the final one. It’s helpful to see it, because it shows Maria as the model, and then her as a flesh-eating zombie, and a damned frightening one at that! Click on each photo to see larger, more detailed versions:
So not only is Maria a Photoshop Goddess (or Guru), she’s also got to be her own model.
Having Photoshop ‘chops’ like Maria’s means that you can pretty much do anything and make it look believable. The next time I need some synthetic reality (I’m thinking, perhaps, of a photo for my wall of me sitting like Forest Gump at the White House with President Obama), I know who I’ll call.