The Radio Times Christmas double issue is a great British tradition, one of Britain's best selling magazines. Every year since 2008, when art director Paul Smith first commissioned it, each issue has featured my Big Picture Quiz a complex graphic composite of cgi illustration, retouching, photographs and 3D elements.
The illustration contains clues to the titles of 50 shows. These quizzes are hugely popular and there are prizes to be won.
This is how the photo illustrations are created in collaboration with the art director Jacob Howard. Yes, they do take ages!
The most important part of the illustration and compositing process, selecting the background, starts in late September. The image has to fulfil many requirements: it has to have:
•A seasonal ‘Christmassy’ atmosphere
• An open area, a ‘stage’ for people and objects.
•Depicted at twilight and artificial lights so that images with varied lighting can be added.
•Windows and buildings for illustrations and graphics to be placed in the setting
•Shot from eye-level (as most of the clues will be)
•Few (if any) people and cars
•Good quality.
You can imagine how few images meet all of these criteria!
Some years I make it snow, using cgi illustration, as in this earlier quiz based on a photo of Shambles in York taken by Martin Williams.
Occasionally I photograph the background myself, but I usually spend many, many hours searching through various picture libraries. You need to take a lot of breaks: after a few hours your eyes begin to glaze over.
The image finally selected is of Covent Garden in London, coincidentally, only a few minutes walk from my studio. It’s by Joe Daniel Price. It’s the first background where I’ve used the original sky. I usually illustrate it with a starry night sky, a useful place to put clues.
Meanwhile the list of 50 programmes for the clue challenges is being assembled. Some titles suit quizzes better than others so there has to be a lot of flexibility. The list is based on the Radio Times magazine top programmes of the year combined with various other lists.
One programme is always there - the most popular show on UK television, Strictly Come Dancing. This is the most important clue as it determines the composition of the Quiz and the images are always colourful and exciting. The Quiz is finished before the Strictly final, so we have to guess who makes it through. This is usually the first image that I work with as it dictates the overall layout of the quiz.
Before the pandemic I ran workshops in advanced Photoshop for small groups of creative professionals and the Quiz was always a useful teaching tool as it involves so many Photoshop techniques. One of the most important aspects, one that will occupy much of professional retouchers time, is cutting out to isolate an image from its background. There are many ways of doing this. In this case I created an outline path for dancers, a flexible line that goes from point to point that can be curved or straight. Hair is the most difficult element to cut out. Here I used Photoshop’s ‘background eraser’ tool and then illustrated some additional, individual hairs using the brush tool to improve and soften the edges.
I use Photoshop masks to remove the background elements so I always keep the original image on the bottom layer as I work. I import the individual image as a smart object so that it can be easily edited later and resized without any loss of image quality.
I double the size of all the images involved so I have more pixels to work with. I always ensure that all verticals are really vertical using ‘transform’ in Photoshop and at the same time slightly change the proportions to fit the page.
It’s important to establish the perspective in this image at a very early stage. For the clues to look convincing they have to visually ‘fit’ into the illustration. With the verticals now straightened this is a 2 point perspective which I can establish using paths. The vanishing points are a hypothetical point where all the lines of diminishing size appear to converge, which can be determined by drawing lines along the edges of the buildings to where they meet. Then any line that is drawn from the vanishing point will match the perspective in the image.
Some perspective transformations are more complex than others.
The images for the Quiz come from a wide variety of sources - press images, film stills, picture libraries, all of which need to be to fitted in to the visual ambience of the Quiz. I illustrate some of the clues and some are 3D CGI renders, created using the same software used to make Hollywood movies.
3D model of a Coronavirus as a Christmas decoration: the model, alpha channel and final render.
There’s one event in 2020 that no-one will ever forget, so I couldn’t ignore it. I created a 3D model of the virus, based on an earlier illustration I made of a Christmas bauble. I applied a reflective glass surface texture and used a virtual CGI camera looking up slightly to match the backgrounds perspective. I surrounded the 3D model with an environment similar to the background, with a darker area on top to reflect its position just under the ceiling.
3D model of Doctor Who's Tardis as a Christmas ornament.
The Tardis was modelled in 3D CGI and lit in the same way, with several virtual cameras at various heights to create a number of renderings in different perspectives to match their relative position on the tree.
Using Photoshops ‘Puppet Warp’ filer.