For this project, I was tasked with creating an editorial illustration for a Mustang News article. I chose my own article, a piece that I co-wrote for The Peak about culture shock. Since my half of the article is written from my perspective, I chose to include myself in the illustration, which depicts me being literally shocked by culture as if it were lightning. 

I added an outer glow effect to the photo of myself, adjusting the spread, noise, and opacity of the glow to achieve a “shocked” look. I chose specifically a slightly blurry photo of myself because I felt it exemplified the shocked and stressed tone I wanted to convey. 
For the lightning, I used the lasso and quick selection tools to cut out lightning from a public domain image, then duplicated two sections of the lightning to add more branches to the image. I then merged the three lightning layers and rotated the full image. 
For the text (culture in all caps), I selected a font that emulated lightning and duplicated the layer. I rasterized both layers and left the first one alone. On the second layer, I used the distortion tools to make it more jagged, specifically using ripple and zigzag. I then duplicated that layer and used gaussian blur. I added a blue outer glow to the adjusted layer for a final effect. I aligned the layer that was not adjusted with the adjusted layers, then moved them to have the lightning branching out of the text towards me. The text is higher than the other elements to display a sense of control, as if the text is deciding how the photo of me is behaving. 
Finally, I took a public domain photo of Poly Canyon Village and moved it behind all of the existing layers but above the black artboard background. I then cropped it to be mostly sky. I added a few adjustment layers to change the brightness and contrast, hue/saturation, and color balance to make the background darker and look more like night or just before sunset. These adjustments were meant to contrast the background with the brighter foreground elements. The color balance and hue/saturation layers were tinted blue to unify with the lightning and text colors.