King Cat:

Peasant Cats:

For this project I ended up focusing on the idea of Survival and wanted to create the two images as a dichotomy where one would portray an imagery of nice and easy living and the other would portray the other side of the coin of a hard perhaps bleak life with some pieces of something like happiness. So instead of using humans as the subject matter which would feel a little too bleak, in my opinion, I chose to use cats which came to my mind since I personally spoil my cat in all he wants and love, but have also run across so many strays in my time living off campus. So to add in a little flair I want to pull back to the times of Kings and Lords and have my cat appear to be a king relating to the phrase, “Living like a King,” and the other image would be based on the idea of “peasants” a la from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Of the Elements and Principles that most appear in my images, the Unity of them is the most important. Across the entire pictures there holds the central them and not much from it really deviates from it. Additionally, I have employed a heavy use of pattern and color to build upon the images. As for color the King Cat image holds mainly colors of purple, red, and yellow which all signify royalty. Whereas the Peasant Cats image holds mainly grays and browns to signify their less than glamorous lives, but there are bits of colors to show that they too have bright parts of them not controlled by their quality of life. As for critiques I received, adding more cats to the Peasant Image was great idea and truly helps the image and also putting a small nice food bowl on the King Cats chair was a nice little suggestion that added nice detail.

*Stock Images were used for the above images.

This picture is inspired by the popular travel postcards that try their best to capture the feel of the place they are from. For this postcard I used a picture I took from the Wright Airforce  Base in Dayton, Ohio. The chosen picture was the one that showed the most angles of the airplane offerings you can see when you visit the base. The picture uses shape and color to give the picture some more memorability especially through the text plastered over the picture. In the text I placed some blue sky as well as foliage because while the inside of the base is dark and filled with machinery; the surrounding area was filled with plains, forest, and blue sky. It truly felt isolated in that way, so that is what I attempted to portray through the text picture. And also the red color of the edges were chosen in order to avoid the pictures within the text to blend with the background image because the red separates background from the text imagery. Also the whole picture was placed on a postcard background to really give it the postcard feel that the picture needs. The image was created by first creating the text in Adobe Illustrator and then placing the text in Photoshop in front of the Wright Airforce Base picture. Then the postcard background was placed above the other two layers with as a Multiply layer to grant the text and photo the same color tone as the postcard picture. Then the photo’s edges were blurred with the “refine edges” tool to blur the photo and postcard together.

Artist Statement:

In this surrealist and dream inspired Photoshop there are a few integral elements and principles of art. There is an overall Unity to the picture with the lighting and setting all fitting into one cohesive piece. Additionally there is a lot of Texture in the piece mostly noticeable with the trees having their texture accentuated with the filters applied to them. This texture also slightly stands out in the ground in front of the trees having a rough and leafy look and feel to it. Also the photo has a wide range of Shape to it in the background whereas in the foreground there is more Form in the hand opening the blinds. The contrast of these two elements makes a distinct area between the foreground and background. During the in progress critique, the main standout issues were that the hand looked to be from a picture taking place during the day and also the faces in the background while having white holes seemed to lack sense of presence to them. So to knock two birds out with one stone, I used a lens flare render on the mouths of the faces to give them more presence as well as give a source to the light that hitting the hand. This actually ended up making the picture look much more cohesive between the foreground and the background! So the context to this image was that of a dream in which I awoke in a decrepit cabin. And as I became familiar with my surroundings I started walking to one of the windows in the cabin. When peering through the blinds, I saw these faces with large white holes for both eyes and mouths pouring light from them throughout the forest in front of the window. In order to create an image similar to that of what I saw in my dream, I had to a multitude of different pictures and layers in order to create a custom landscape. I took a multitude of pictures of trees which were then isolated then sent through a glowing line filter. Then the trees were given a black and white filter treatment with varying brown tints added. Behind the trees is a enlarged picture of bushes also run through similar filters but instead with a green tint instead of brown tint. The ground in front of the trees was from an inclined hill on my street covered in grass and leaves that was cropped and then run through the glowing edges filter. Then the faces were crafted from a picture of car lights at night and then a lens flare render was added to the mouths. Behind the faces a black blob was crafted to give the faces a body since without that the faces looked very weird and just not right. For the foreground I took a picture of my hand opening the blinds of a window in my room and then I cleared that picture so that only the hand and blinds remained since I wanted it to look like I was actually peering  at these faces and trees.

To start, some of the principles and elements of art present in the above photo are color, pattern, space, and some asymmetrical balance. The color here is wide ranging but in each pattern sub-segment there is a distinct use of two or three colors as well as the red highlights holding in the feel that this is a Coca-Cola bottle. Then there are the three patterns themselves and the space that contrasts with the photo that arguably takes up up at least a third of the picture with just the neon green lying in that space. And there is the balance of the photo where the bottle itself is symmetrical down the mid-line of the picture but as you move further from the mid-line there is asymmetry in the patterns on each side of the bottle. This edit of a Coca-Cola Vanilla bottle is inspired by Andy Warhol’s art work with a little of a personal twist. Where as Andy used color to highlight parts of a photo in addition to his iconic bright backgrounds and additional effects, I wanted to use color patterns that could maybe attempt to show what it feels like when I see a bottle of Coca-Cola Vanilla. A bottle of vanilla coke, to me, irradiates a sense of happiness which I denoted with the yellow and purple stars/sparkles on the left and also it shines brightly compared to other soft drinks so I showed that feeling with these sharp lines of light that the drink appears to let out. Additionally, Coca-Cola is heavily known for its burn, refreshing feeling, and its carbonation which I tried to show by populating the inner area of the bottle with color dots that evoked close to this feeling for myself. So, when creating this image I started simply with the bottle and asked myself what I see in my head when I think about Coke Vanilla and went section by section in the picture attempting to capture that sight and feeling in my head. The left sparkles were first created by making yellow stars with the pencil tool and then using a smaller sized pencil with the purple color to fill the insides and only keeping the yellow edges. The right section started with making the line shapes I wanted with a blue pencil and then from there a slightly smaller sized pencil below the blue and then an even smaller sized pencil with a light orange color that went over the edge created between the blue and white. The inner dots were created in order to white, blue, then brown and haphazardly placed around in order to capture the randomness of carbonation bubbles in a soft drink. Then lastly I filled in the cap and bottle sticker with red in order to keep the Coke brand in most focus.

(Photos from http://www.jamesnachtwey.com)

James Nachtwey was born in Syracuse, New York, on the 14^th of March in 1948 where he would eventually go study Art History and Political Science at Dartmouth College and finished there in 1970. The photography of Nachtwey that would later shower many rewards such as the Robert Capa Medal, Magazine Photograph of the Year, the Infinity Award, the World Press Photo, and countless more was first inspired from the photography that he saw coming out of the Vietnam War  and the American Civil Rights movement. He first started learning photograph while he worked aboard ships and as a truck driver eventually leading him to become an apprentice news editor. Then in 1976 he would finial start his main journalism and photography work for a newspaper in New Mexico and then four years later he would travel to New York to start work as a freelancer photographer. James Nachtwey would then start his work with Time in 1984 and has since been a contractor for them. He would then also become a member of the Black Star phot agency until 1985, join Magnum Photos from 1896 to 2001, and finally in 2001 start his very own photo agency VII (Fundacion Princesa de Asturias). As seen from James Nachtwey’s website Witness Photography by James Nachtwey, James Nachtwey’s career would show him documenting some of the most horrific pictures from conflicts in Afghanistan, to the AIDs epidemic in Africa, to the actions of people in war torn areas, to the famine ravaged areas of the world through the terrifying pictures of men with no fat or muscle on their body, and even most recently he was in New York during 9/11 and took powerful pieces of the World Trade Center while falling and after falling. He spent four decades out in war torn areas or disaster areas trying to show the people the disturbing state that some places of the world are in. He would put his life second in order to capture these photos as seen when he first received his first injury from a combat zone. When he was documenting the United States involvement in Iraq James had a grenade thrown into a military Humvee he was in where a Time employee Michael Weisskopf attempted to throw the grenade out of the vehicle. Ultimately James received his first combat injury from this grenade and was airlifted to Germany and then back to the United States for treatment (Ratnesar 2003). In addition to his amazing photography, Nachtwey has also featured in a documentary War Photographer in which it followed Nachtwey’s life and the work he has done thus also featuring more avenues for people to learn of the terrifying injustices of the world. Additionally, the documentary was nominated in the Academy Awards for best documentary film which gave further publicity to Nachtwey and his photography. James Nachtwey is known as being one of the best war photographers around the world and his imagery will always be there showing the world the dark and sad parts of the world (Fundacion Princesa de Asturias).

References:

Fundacion Princesa de Asturias. Retrieved from http://www.fpa.es/en/princess-of-asturias-awards/laureates/2016-james-nachtwey.html#recurso.

Ratnesar, Romesh, & Weisskopf, Michael. (2003). “Portrait Of A Platoon”. Time. Retrieved from http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1006535-1,00.html.

Witness Photography by James Nachtwey. Retrieved from http://www.jamesnachtwey.com.

The above Photoshop creation is based on the paintings and ideas of Guiseppe Arcimboldo where he would take ideas and objects and incorporate them into the portraits of people. The elements and principles of art are present within this creation through color and the shape of the objects put together which form what looks to be a person taking a picture of themselves. This picture was based on a picture of myself and the objects that are now making up the picture are just a few things that I feel I use and like a lot. I cannot go a day without my laptop and keyboard, I eat pasta with Alfredo and Pesto sauce almost everyday of the week, I have been using that same pencil for probably the past three years at the very least, and I consume likely way above the average amount of coffee. The background image was taken at a nearby park by my home in Cleveland where there is an overhang that overlooks a huge valley. I used it as the background since I used to go there all the time and while it is not an object the piece needed a background and it may as well be something that still characterized a part of me. The actual process of creating the image started with me gathering pictures of the objects used and then attempting to the best of my ability to piece them over a picture of myself. At a certain point it started looking ridiculous so I decided why not go for all out strange with it which caused myself to give me a coffee mug hat since I love coffee so much it is basically a drug to me and also game me some coffee ground bag eyes. Overall I am happy with the final product since it really contains the core things I love to use, or eat, the most!

Starting with art elements and principles this work has a heavy presence of both movement and proportion. There is movement in the multiple ways you can follow the subject looking around at his surroundings. And his facial features have been messed with in size where in some cases his eyes, mouth, or nose are larger or smaller than elsewhere in the picture. The critiques I received as suggestions were to make the background less of a focus because of the picture being too busy and in one part of the picture the top of his head was showing below his nose. So I attempted changing the background to a gray scale while keeping the color of the subject but halfway through the process I realized I personally preferred the more busy look of the picture and the gray-scale just did not look as well as expected. And I also adjusted the pictures around so that his hair would only show on the very top end of combined pictures and adjusted some of the proportions of the pictures so that all his features looked further cohesive while still being fairly disjointed. The context of this image comes in the form of my good friend having a class in a movie theater and his reactions to what it was like to be in such a strange and different learning environment. Based on his shown reactions there is a wonderment to being in a movie theater for a class but there is also a sense peculiarity towards the idea of it mainly seen towards the left side of the image. As for the process of creating the picture I had the idea in my head of radially moving outward from a straight on type of view to the side views of his face while incorporating the theater seats in weird, continuous forms in the background. So I started by simply going through all the pictures and cutting out pieces of his face and the movie theater that would lend to this idea, and from there I just kept experimenting with different positions of those pictures until I liked what I made!