Richard Hamilton (+Pastiches)

Richard Hamilton was an English artist who was best known for his collage, painting and graphics. I found his print, Toaster, and thought it'd be run to try to recreate it. Initially, I didn't realise it was a print, so I decided that I'd make my own version using photography since that's what I'd mistook it for.

Obviously, I started off by taking a photo of my toaster. It was a little harder than anticipated - ideally I would've liked no reflections on the glass front, but that wasn't really possible. Once I'd settled on one, I then used the apps Photoshop Mix and Photoshop Fix on my phone to edit it. I used these apps mostly out of convenience since I'm pretty familiar with all the tools (I use them for personal edits etc) and because they're free. It also meant that I could work on it away from home if needs be.

To begin, I desaturated the whole image. Hamilton's print was in greyscale (except, of course, the red text). From there, I cropped the toaster out of the image and tweaked the contrast until I was happy with how it looked. I also increased the clarity a little, just to get a more crisp appearance.
To get the background of my Hamilton pastiche, I cropped part of the kitchen counter from the original. Our countertops have a bit of colour variation, so I thought I'd take advantage of it, using the defocus tool to remove the crisp edges that separated each tone. I tweaked the values until I was happy with how the toaster looked. My toaster is a lot lighter than the one Hamilton made, so I obviously had to use a dark background for it to pop.
When I was happy with how it looked, I simply added the red "owens" text using MS Paint.

Now that the image itself was complete, I moved onto the text aspect. To do this, I simply used Google Docs. I inserted the image onto the document, split the text into three columns, and wrote something inspired by the text in the original print. When I was done, I saved it as a PDF, and used a PDF cropping site to make it the size I wanted, before converting it to a PNG.

I really enjoyed making this pastiche, and I'm really happy with how it turned out, especially compared to the image I had took. Originally, I had wanted to stick to my theme of trying to be really accurate to the original artwork, down the the creation process. I'm really glad that I didn't as it allowed me to take advantage of modern technology and add my own twist to it.