Our first assignment for Basic Design asked us to practice our Photoshop skills by creating a mythical creature with pieces from the La Salle University Art Museum and open-source images. Looking through the museum’s digital collections, I found Johannes Hannot’s “Still Life with Fruit” which I used at the background. I also found the creature’s dog head in a painting titled “A Raja on Horseback Hunting Boar” by an unknown artist. The creature’s body was found Pixabay in a rat vector which was originally black and white. I also manipulated the tail and limbs to make the creature more realistically sit on the edge of the plate. The wings were found in a butterfly photograph on Pixabay which I increased the contract on and changed the hue of to better fit with the colors on the rest of the creature’s body. My  work was featured on the Department of Digital Arts’ Instagram page.

Background Story of the Creature: The Winged Canirattus is a peculiar hybrid between a rodent and a canine with wings. Much like bees, scientists don’t quite understand how this creature’s wings can carry its body through the air, but perhaps that’s what is so mythical about it. In fact, scientists don’t know much about it at all, they have observed that it thrives in warmer climates where there is plenty of fruit to feast on.