Click on the picture to enjoy the GIFF of my dog Sable, looking for treats.

For this project, I was inspired by Penelope Umbrico’s Sunset’s From Flicker and Everyone’s Photos Any License. She used pictures that other people have taken of the sun and moon to create a large collage essentially creating a new piece of art itself. I chose the subject of eyes because in class we have mentioned repeatedly that we feel as if eyes are the gateway to someone’s soul. I was interested in seeing how many people also thought that way and was amazed at how many images of eyes I could find as well as the digitally manipulated art of eyes as well as studio art of eyes I could find on the internet. Searching “eyes” on google will give you 3,700,000,000 results. For my project I didn’t want to give the pictures a grid and their own space within the full image like Penelope did in her images, rather I wanted to present them together overlaying each other so as you look into one eye you are interrupted by another and you look to that next eye and on to the next. I sorted the eyes so it would flow from light to dark and eye color that were similar were in the general location of each other. I incorporated real eyes with digitally manipulated eyes with hyper-realistic paintings/drawings. I wanted to show the interested we have humans have into peering into someone’s eyes to see who they are.

For this project, I wanted to take pictures of my dogs being themselves and then take away the background from the images to isolate the dogs into their own space. I think each of my dogs has their own personality and I wanted to capture their personalities and put the focus on them. I also wanted to try to get as much detail extracted from the photos I could. The Chihuahuas have more detail with the fir than the third dog because the original photos were taken with my Nikon camera in direct sunlight opposed to the third which was taken with my phone camera at night which didn’t allow for as much detail in the fir to show up in the photograph.

This is Bella, she is a chihuahua that I have had since we got her as a puppy in 2007. She is my dog but she lives with my parents with her sister Marlee. She loves going for walks doesn’t mind wearing her bat wings. For this I wanted to isolate Bella by taking out the background it wasn’t very distracting but I wanted total attention on her.

This is Marlee, she is the sister to Bella, they were born in the same litter in 2007. She is my brother’s chihuahua. She may have been the runt of the litter but she runs the house. She is definitely a character. The background on the original photo wasn’t too distracting, there were trees behind her but I wanted to isolate her because the face she is making is just so perfect it doesn’t need a background at all. I really wanted didn’t want to cut out the detail of her whiskers. This was the hardest and easiest photo to bring out as much detail of the fir as I could. The original photo had sharp detail of the fir that wasn’t blurred making it easy to pick out but it was hard going in with a small eraser tool to make sure they would show up.

Lastly, this is the newest member of the family, Sable. She is my 6-year-old golden retriever/whippet that I just adopted Sable this weekend. This photo was probably the easiest to take out the background because a lot of the fine detail in her fir on the edges were blurred making it easy to make cleaner lines to draw her out of the background.