Ceremony

This picture was used for a poster for a local competition to promote reading a certain book. In this case, the book is a book of poetry. One of the poems is layered onto the models face.

Nature Queen

 

While working on some college essays, I decided to work on some of my photography to help my creative juices flow. I had some photographs of trees that I hadn't used yet, so I decided to incorporate them in a layered portrait. The images on the face are the same picture of tree branches except one is reflected to create a sense of symmetry. Overall, I love this image and plan to use this image in my final breadth. 

New Pieces

 

Here are some photographs I’ve worked on in the last few weeks. While playing around with some new techniques in Photoshop I created the layered portrait. The green area is a collection of leaves, while the blue area is a crashing wave flipped on its side. The triptych I made revolves around the idea of nature co-existing with technology. I started with one image, a picture of a pigeon with an engine background, but I then decided to make it into a triptych with other birds having a similar background.

Arts and Communication: 2D Semester 1 Final

 

 

 

 

1.       In all these photographs I explored a variety of subjects ranging from life and beauty all the way to the concepts of the coexistence of technology and technology. I originally started with simple, yet intricate images of natural objects and slowly ebbed my way out of subjects and into more thematic pieces. One piece that particularly shows my theme of nature and technology is my image with the pigeon. In this image I wanted to use a background of machine while having some natural creature in the foreground. In this image, I show how nature and our own society have learned to coexist. There may be damages and conflict as shown by the two females in the other image, but in the pigeon photograph it shows that we simply overcome this and we just move on.  

 

2.       I am much more connected to this group of photos compared to those of last year. With these photos I not only used photos to express a part of me, but I used my artistic intuition in several of these photos such as the triptych and layered statue image. The layered image with the two females shows how I constantly have to live with constant inner conflict caused by not only myself but my environment as well.

 

3.       I wanted to explore a variety of subjects, especially beauty and simplicity as I did not cover this topic before and wanted to go test it out. The main subject I explored I feel is nature versus technology, as well as inner conflict. I wanted to explore man versus nature mainly because of the parallels that are present between both worlds. With inner conflict I wanted to see how I can express this ideas using different subject matters like animals and even using other themes to express the concept of inner conflict.

 

4.       At the beginning of the set of images I simply took a picture of something that I liked or that I knew could express a concept. I simply just touched up the photos by fixing the contrast and levels of the photos. Later in the set of photos I began to use layering and since I had already come up with an idea, I looked for photos that would make great backgrounds and foregrounds that would bring my concept to life. By the end of the set of photos I had greatly used editing to play around with layers, contrast, saturation, hue, and levels.

 

5.       The many principles of design that I used were mainly texture, color schemes, movement, emphasis, rule of thirds, contrast, and mood. I used texture to provide an interesting feel to the overall photograph, and became very necessary in the layered images as to get the most out of them, a great texture is needed. I used a lot of contrast and low saturation colors to show the more serious tones for some of the photos. Mood is greatly present in a lot of my photos and covers a great range from joy to conflict. In the last image I used analogous colors to show how opposite and conflicting the two entities are supposed to be.

 

6.       I challenged myself by using a lot more layering on different subjects and just working with more advanced themes. Compared to just having work that just follows a basis and no real theme, my new work is heavily revolved around themes with each photos representing a part of a different or occurring theme. Also in some of my layered images I erased parts of a certain layer to keep only a portion of either the foreground or background.

 

7.       What I really like about this body of work is that I feel like I was really able to communicate the themes and subject matter I was able to explore. I also feel like my work is much more advanced than what it was before. I simply also enjoy the craftsmanship of images as the images are beautifully edited and look intentional instead of a mistake.

 

8.       I feel like my work could be a bit more diverse as this is probably not my final breadth. I want to include a piece that has some story to it, to give my body of work more depth. I also would like to actually enhance some of the pieces I already have to further explore the ideas I wanted to focus on. Overall I feel like I could give my body of work a unifying theme that shows a great amount of variety at the same time.

 

9.       Next semester I plan focus more on my personal series, and possibly work on other pieces that can accomplish the unifying theme I am striving for. My series will go more in depth into the concept of nature and technology while at the same time portraying human emotions and the inner conflict it can create.

 

10.   I plan to challenge myself further by creating pieces that require more editing, and I hope to be able to work on some photos that can tell a story.

Conflict

I wanted to work on something quickly, so I decided to do a layered portrait image like the rest of the class. In this photo I used a previous diptych and merged them with an image of nature and an image of a man-made object. I used the nature image for the friendlier photo, and used the mechanical image on the harsher appearing model to make her appear more menacing.

Moving On

 

In this picture I wanted to incorporate a mechanical background to show how the natural world continues to move forward while our world continues to become more artificial.

The Goddess

This photo isn’t related to my series, but when I took the image of the statue during my holiday vacation, I wanted to do a layered edit with it.  In the sphere, I incorporated some roots I found on a wall. I really liked the crawling, sort of spreading motion it has. I put this image on the sphere because I wanted to give it a more ancient, sort of abandoned look. For the statue, I wanted to give it a sort of medieval, even Renaissance type of feel to it, so I added the texture of an old bed frame to it. Overall, the piece as a whole represents the appearance of a goddess with a golden color and a majestic, powerful stance.