Forest of Tolkien

Today, you will experience a walk through a Forest of Tolkien.

Neutral Materials

In chapter 11 of our book Stewart talks about all of the different materials used in art and how structures are created, etc. I absolutely love seeing art pieces that are made out of already existing materials, so I really enjoyed reading this chapter. I tend to think of home crafting and art journaling when I think about stuff like this chapter brought up. I know that it's kind of a broad leap, but I greatly enjoy viewing and creating art journals myself, and I do find them to be a type of art piece.

People who do art journaling put a lot of creativity and thought into their work and create absolutely beautiful pages, so I'm going to share a few that I've seen here! I LOVE to see how many layers are put into this work!

Design Principles

While reading this chapter, I kept applying all of the principles to my thoughts about my photography process. I realized that a few of these things are things I have always struggled with.

Balanced grouping, especially in Family Photos, is something that I have a special frustration with, because I feel like I really just don’t have an eye for. I can do 1-2 people easily, but when you get more than that? I pretty much cannot come up with any really nice combinations when in the spur of the moment. I realized this struggle a couple of years ago, and while I still haven’t gotten a lot better, I have made a little progress and it is a skill I am very definitely trying to grow.  

On the other hand, there are some aspects of design that I feel like I have been able to gain skills in more easily, such as Emphasis through Contrast, and Scale and Proportion. Four years ago, I taught a three week photography class to young teenagers about Dramatic Emphasis through Contrast in Photography, and it was super fun, and I loved getting to share my love of dramatic, contrasting photography with young teens who were super willing to soak up all I had to share. It was a great three weeks.

Anyways, my thoughts here are that it is very interesting how some of these principles come much more easily to me as an artist than others.

Below are four Dramatic Light/Contrast shots that I used or took for that class, and one is a photo that I took to show texture, which is another design principle.

Stop, It's Hammer Time

I'm having a ton of fun working on my Stop-Motion project, currently titled "Stop, It's Hammer Time" simply for lack of a better, more reasonable title. I am going to try and come up with a title more acknowledging of the content of the video, but we'll see.

My project is very heavily Lord of the Rings related, so just be aware that my nerd side is definitely showing right now. And I'm very much considering using the idea of vignettes... My video is currently resting at about 40 seconds, and I am hoping to get it over one minutes, but we will see how that goes when I actually make it into Final Cut Pro.. In the mean time, I am trying to come up with another 'light bulb' (please read this again in Gru's voice if you didn't already) moment idea!

I can't wait until I am able to see my own finished video!!!!! I'm so impatient. Lol.