Abstract Triptych

For my Vector Exercise, I started off with the word "April" in all capital letters in the font style KG Feeling 22 (this was a font that I downloaded from dafont.com). The first triptych box has the letters AP, the second box has the letter R, and the third box has the letters IL. April is a significant to me because my birthday is in April as well as my parent's wedding anniversary, so if they had never gotten married I probably wouldn't be here today lol. I played around with the points and handles on the text outlines to make them look more abstract. I also cut a few letters in half with the eraser tool then changed the colors and stroke styles as I pleased. I can't say that I had a real direction in mind for where this exercise would go but this is my final piece!

Balance

So yes I'm behind on the reading and blogging. I swear I'll get caught up this week! I just read pg. 66-81 discussing composition grouping, patterns and balance. Oh how I am a balance queen! You can see this in my photomontage, I tried very hard to make the colored rectangles in the background balance well with the surrounding negative space. I'm a little OCD so I think that plays a role haha. My hope for this class though is to go out on a limb and explore making my pieces less balanced simply because I feel they are more real and artsy than something perfectly balanced. Just my thoughts.

Photomontage - Sweet Dreams

              When we were first given this assignment, I struggled to come up with creative ideas for my photomontage. I knew that I wanted to capture something that involved movement but wasn’t sure exactly what that should be. When I was lying in bed later that night, a thought came to my mind; why not take photos of someone while they are sleeping? Now that sounds a little creepy but try not to think about it like that. If you have ever seen a small child toss and turn in their sleep, you can’t help but wonder what they are dreaming about or what kind of stresses they had during the day. That is the type of emotion I wanted to capture in my photos.

                Of course, I didn’t actually want to spend hours watching someone while they were sleeping and take photos. So I asked my boyfriend if he would be my model and pretend he was sleeping in his bed while I capture the pictures on my camera. I had an image in my head of looking down at the person on their bed but in order to make this work, I had to stand on a ladder and take photos. This was a little tricky because it was hard to keep my hands in the same spot, like a tripod would. It all worked out though.

                For editing purposes, I had to take a picture of the bed by itself to have as my base layer in Photoshop, so I did that. Then I started pulling in pictures of the various sleeping positions and using the Select Tool to cut around just the body and make a new layer via copy. This project really helped me advanced my editing skills in Photoshop and try out new features like blending, erasing, and adjusting opacity. I wanted one sleeping position to be the focal point and the rest to show up as ghostly images to present the implication of time passing. I also really liked having a white background as negative space around the bed, but decided to add blocks of color that tied in with the photo to help break up the space so it didn’t appear as if the bed was just magically floating. I’m very happy with my final result.