Weekly Challenge 4

My challenge was portraiture. I decided to emulate Cindy Sherman and do self portraiture. It's sorta emo.. awkward. 

20 Layers
I used record covers, record shards, playing cards, sharpies, nail polish, transparencies, spray paint, fabric, duct tape, images from other record covers, and white cardboard. I only adjusted brightness in Photoshop and added some yellow brush in the middle to connect the bottom left corner to the middle.

I actually sketched this out quickly during math and I am very happy with the way it turned out. I've been trying to strengthen my fine art skills and was happy at the turn out of this because the feathers look more realistic than I have been able to draw in the past.

 

Summer Art: I have a sort of obsession with street signs so I tried to photograph them in a way that focused on the colors and even minute textures of the signs and I tried to turn an everyday object into an eye-catching photograph. I selected the background in both images and desaturated them to make the colors pop even more and I raised both contrast and brightness and adjusted curves and levels. Both of these were taken in Old Town Louisville.  

Summer Art:
  I came across this horse along a trail in Boulder. I used a selective focus and some of the blur tool in Photoshop in order to create the effect. I additionally adjusted contrast and brightness for interest.

For my concentration, I picked a theme of letting go of stress because that's something I'm currently working through. I don't have a first image picked out as of now but I think this is going to end up as my last image of Concentration. I wanted the image to depict the model as finally being stress free and relaxing in nature. I might retake the picture to have her look more relaxed as opposed to dead in a field... But this is the basis of what I imagine as the final image.

Summer Art:
 I focused highly on the center of the sunflower and the stem which caused the leaves to have very clear, crisp lines. I took the shot in monochrome and in Photoshop, I duplicated the layer and added a gaussien blur at about 32%. Then I added a thin black border to tie the picture together.

Weekly Challenge #1: Opposing emotions. This weekly challenge truly was a challenge for me. I decided quickly on my photos and the emotions I wanted to use but the mixing of the two photos was very hard for me to conceptualize. 

Like the first, this summer art was my attempt at stretching my comfort zone and doing more mixed media as opposed to my usual photopure technique. I did heavy makeup on my little sister to create a dramatic effect and I added filters to both the eyeshadow and her hair. This made the image appear more like a drawing than a photo. 

This was my first summer artwork. I was attempting to combine photoshop brushes with photos and I wanted to add depth by copying the sunflower and putting it above the brushes and also add an HDR effect onto the sunflower to make it a strong focal point.