McCall: Playing with Photoshop!

So, I played around a little bit with my sibling headshots this afternoon, for fun. Looking forward to continuing to play with these once I learn new techniques. 

In the first mesh, I just took random portions of all of our faces and added them together.
In the second mesh, I aligned it from top to bottom by age.

McCall: Headshots

In which I show the head shots I took of six of my seven siblings. 

The age range represented here is over 20 years. 

What do you think, do we look related?

I personally think that I look like the odd one out. And not just because I'm on my own line.. Haha.

McCall

For another class, DTC 101, we are going to start a project where we mesh together multiple people's faces, which Sena let us know about ahead of time. So this put an idea in my head!

Over the weekend I saw six of my seven siblings, and I had the idea to take head shots of each of them, as well as myself so I could compile a single photo of all of us put together, just for fun!

It's not for any of my classes, but I'm pretty psyched about it in general, so I thought I'd share it as I work on it! I haven't uploaded the photos to my computer yet, but I'll keep you updated!
It has already been really interesting looking at the photos on my camera and seeing just how different and also how similar we all look from one another!

Kinesthetics

After reading the section of our text on ‘Spacial Dynamics’ and especially pages 100-101, I realize that my mind tends to gravitate almost immediately upon viewing an artwork to attempt to find a sort of movement in the image or other media. I tend to really love movies that have a lot of wide or other interesting angle shots (Mulan—which just so happened to be mentioned on pages 100 and 101, and The Two Towers, and others like that!). I always look for movement. When an image is stagnant, I don’t really like it, usually, but if it has an element of movement to it, that will almost always draw me in! (example of an image that I find really interesting, below.)

 On another note, the idea of the study of movement, or kinesthetics, in general just really excites me. I have always loved noticing peoples little hand movements while they are talking or dancing, or how someone maybe cocks their head while they are thinking, and I feel like how someone moves tells a lot about the beauty of their inner self. 

Multi-faceted

In my Photo Montage project, I kept with the “selfie” concept, and took it this time as a way to represent the different aspects of my life that I deem important. I am a photographer, a reader, a dancer, a Tolkien junkie, a church-goer, a lover of dresses, a coffee drinker, a plaid fanatic, and much more-- but I also represented myself in my work uniform and my pajamas, and my normal every day clothes. I took photos of all these different personalities by dressing to the character and snapping shots over the course of four different days at multiple times of day, including 7:00 am, 3:00 pm, 5:00 pm, and 8:00 pm.
 I know that if a person was to take this montage out of context they may think “wow, she’s really vain and obsessed with herself” but what I wanted to show was the idea that every person has an un-imaginable amount of facets to their character and personality, and each of those aspects cannot represent the person fully. This montage simply represents a few aspects of who I am right now, and I think it is cool that I can make this and have it to remind myself in the future of what I thought was important or interesting about myself in September of 2015. Maybe some of these things about myself will completely change or develop more fully, and that will make it a really cool experience to look back on this project and see what has changed, when and if the time comes. 

Chapter Four: Illusions

In chapter four of our text Mary Stewart talks about the illusions in artwork of space, motion, time passing, etc.
We talked about David Hockney's montages recently in class, and the book references them again, as an example of the illusion of time passing in "fracture space".

I love that you can glance at a photo montage or mosaic like this one and easily imagine the movement and the passage of time simply from a few still images placed together artistically.

I was thinking about the concept of representing time in a photo, and I thought of an idea of dancers again. (Dancing seems to be a common theme with me and photo montages... I might have to play with that idea... )

SO ANYWAYS. Thinking about dancing along with time, got me on a tangent. The beauty of dancing never fades with age, but the bodies of dancers will eventually fade. And I feel like this photo below represents that idea quite well. The spirit and past of a dancer will always remain, even when the ability to perform is long gone.

Balance & Symmetry

I enjoyed reading through this chapter and seeing visual representations of these principals. I realized through reading this that I tended to have a lot of symmetrical balance and a mostly evenly distributed visual weight in a lot of my abstract drawings in the past. Along with those, I saw a lot of represented ideals that I utilize regularly in my photography but I never realized were such a huge part of design, such as isolation and centricity and eccentricity.

A quote I loved from this chapter:

“Excessive unity can be monotonous, while excessive variety can be chaotic.” Stewart 67.

Dancers

My immediate first thought on what would make a beautiful montage was to photograph a dance scenario and compile the images. I don't know how well it would work for me to do that this weekend, but here is a similar visual representation of the idea that came to mind. I've got a bunch of other ideas I'm psyched about, but this photo is beautiful, so I thought I'd share.

Harmony and Disharmony

On pages 53 and 54 of our text, Mary Stewart talks about Disharmony in color specifically and how it can be utilized in multiple ways, sometimes as very harsh and grotesque color schemes to make you feel uncomfortable, seemingly, and other times in ways that actually are not so bad (Steve Quinn. A Christmas Memory. 1991). I especially found it interesting that she pointed out the fact that color disharmony is used to direct your attention to matters than might be more controversial(Gorilla girls poster on page 54.)

It made me think about how I tend to use colors in my own works, and I realized that I tend to stay away from direct color disharmony, and it makes me wonder if that is due to my own need to avoid conflict. There are so many things that can come through psychologically in our own art, it’s incredible. 

SELFIE: Self Portrait

For a little background, I am a portrait photographer who absolutely loves taking way too many selfies. For my project I took the raster self-portrait prompt and turned to the idea of the selfie. I decided to portray my everyday life in photos that I tiled in the background as well as on the objects which I utilize every day (i.e. my pillows and blanket), representing my life through selfies. 

I included a lot of photos of only myself, but I also included several photos of me with my friends and/or family members. I call this my Selfie Self Portrait, and I have titled it “Vanity”, due to the fact that I take way too many selfies. Selfies and portraits of me taken by others are definitely a part of who I am, because I love to document what I look like, who I am with at any given time, and my experiences with photos. It is important for me to not only have a memory of the place in my head, but to also have a memory I can hold and show others.

Basic Elements

While reading the second chapter of ‘Launching the Imagination’ I really liked how Stewart is very relate-able and easily understood when she talks about the relationship between the elements of art (lines, shapes, texture, etc), and how our choices in how we utilize these elements affect the overall feel of the art that is produced. I’ve studied these elements a little in the past, but it is always good to read another source on the matter and get a slightly different opinion or wording.

 I thought it was neat to see that the movie ‘Casablanca’ utilized so many different values of lighting. It made me think about the artistic side of the film production process, and how it probably has a much deeper effect on how the audience views the movie that I had ever noticed before. 

It’s one of those things where you definitely know art is involved, but maybe you don’t realize how deeply. Pretty neat to think about.