"Mars: The New Earth" was intended to be a mock billboard for a company building homes on Mars. The objective was to convince as many people to move to Mars as possible.
Sarah created multiple drawings to decide how to build this billboard, then wrote a list of slogans to decide which marketing approach she would use. She decided on a slogan that gave hope to those disillusioned with life on Earth, and a design that would appeal to those looking to escape the bustle of life on Earth, without forsaking human life entirely. She wanted to give the impression that life on Mars would be different from life on Earth, but not so different as to dissuade people from living there.
To create this design, Sarah took four images -- one of a red landscape, one of a small house, one of a basketball hoop, and one of a rocketship -- and combined them on a document in Adobe Photoshop. She removed the elements from their respective images and used layer masks to delete any elements of the former images. Then, she set them up so as to look like a home in the middle of a Mars landscape, complete with a spaceship headed back to Earth, presumably to bring more people to Mars.
Sarah used the Clone Stamp tool to eliminate the green of the grass surrounding the house, then the Color Replacement Tool to color the house and basketball hoop orange. She lowered the opacity so the house and basketball hoop would appear to be dusted with red dirt. She used the Color Replacement Tool to create the shadows.
For the captions, she used text boxes with a slight orange drop shadow.
Sarah's biggest challenge in this project was making the spaceship look realistic. For that, she had to create a flame coming out of the rocket. She used the paintbrush tool to paint a purple and yellow flame, then used the blur tool and a paintbrush tool with a lighter opacity to make the rocket's flame appear as if it were really on fire.
Lastly, she adjusted the curves to make all the shadows in the image match.
In the future, Sarah plans to clean up this image by making the house and basketball hoop bigger and darker. She wants to add people to this image so the scene would not appear lonely in nature. She also wants to change the spaceship so it does not stand out as much as it does in the project.
