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Photoshop
Work - Recreating The Colosseum
This Colosseum (also
sometimes Coliseum) image was created by me after my holiday to Rome when I wanted
to portray the magnificent structure as it might once have looked. It was my first
holiday to Italy and we spent a long weekend going round the famous ancient sites.
It's an amazing place for tourists, even on visits without much planning because
such amazing pieces of history litter the city.
I used an existing tourist
postcard image as a basis and used various techniques to take other parts that
still exist and repeat them around the rest of the shape. It wasn't simply a case
of mirroring what
was already there becuase so much of the centre of this amazing piece of history
was incomplete and it is not a simple matter to wrap the rest of the building
around because the perspective can't be easily adapted. The image on the right
shows how I roughly mapped out where the majority of the front of the Colosseum
was missing, and what I had to fill in as a patchwork of other cloned areas. Most
of the arches were copied from the part that was rebuilt at the bottom a couple
of centuries ago but this had to be distorted and tinted, with a whole new set
of shadows added. After this, large blocks had to placed in the arches on which
used to stand an array of impressive statues.
The Colosseum was originally
called the Flavian Amphitheatre and was the largest of its kind in the Roman Empire.
Contruction began in 72AD and was finished in 80AD, and it was used for entertainment
such as gladiator combat for about two hundred years. Still up until the 500s
it was in use for one thing and another but two earthquakes around that time caused
significant structural damage. Another earthquake in 847AD and a fourth in 1349
did most of the rest of the damage however in its state of ruin it was then plundered
for marble that was used in the construction of St Peter's Basilica in the 16th
century. In 1749 however the abuse was stopped by Pope Benedict XIV and bits of
reconstruction were attempted in the centuries after, leading to the very new-looking
brighter-coloured brick.
Rome is a massively popular tourist destination
due to historical features. Some of the most significant and those I visited while
having my holiday in Rome were:
Ara Pacis, Aurelian Walls Baths of Caracalla,
Baths of Diocletian, Bocca della Verità, Castel Sant'Angelo, Catacombs
of Rome, Circus Maximus, Forum Romanum, Imperial forums, Colosseum, Curia Hostilia,
Cloaca Maxima, Palatine Hill, Pantheon, St. Peter's Basilicas, Torre dei Conti,
Torre delle Milizie, Trajan's Column.
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