Week 6

Assignment:

Turn in first draft, and work on concept.

Craft:

I took a bunch of photos of my boyfriend. I told him to act out different emotions he felt but usually never expressed. I took the images and combined them to create the mash-up piece. I used the magic wand, layer masks and the eraser. I also resized two of the images to be smaller in the piece. 

Composition:

I chose these photos because I feel they directly reflect the frustration felt by not being able to express yourself. I shrunk the two images along side the main one to express the inner self, or your conscious. 

Concept:

After my meeting with Prof. Peck I had to came up with a concept. He said to use this as a chance to say something I otherwise would not be able to express. I have never had a problem saying what I feel but I know a bunch of people that for various circumstances cannot say or act on their feelings. I wanted to 

show their inner turmoil. I wanted to give them a voice since they cannot find their own.

Week Five

Assignment:
Come up with a fun unique concept. Take twenty five pictures that we will use to create the concept piece. Work on a mash up with two or more photos that we have taken.

Craft:
Using my Olympus FE-210, I went shooting tiny things with my Macro settings. I took pictures of fruit, bowls of milk, money, and other small objects. I also shot people, who I used either an action shot or landscape. I wanted my people all in focus and I want to be able to capture their actions.

Composition:
For my photos, I try to get the best color possible. I like bright vibrant colors, strong contrast, and powerful lines. For these photos, I used bright lighting to bring out the detail for the later mash-up.

Conception:
The concept I am going for in my eventual mash-up is simple pleasures in the little things. I want to take things we see everyday and add something extraordinary to them. Like for a bowl of milk, I want to add people lounging about the edge of the bowl in swimsuits and on floaties in the milk. Have people scale(mountain climb) a persons sleeping face. Have someone ski down a powdered donut. There is so much I can do with this concept that I don't have to worry about difficulty coming up with an mash-up. I just need happy people and small objects.

Week Four

Assignment:

Working on the final product for the Mash-up.



Craft:

I took the photo I had of an empty field, and tinted it blue. I than overlaid a photo of a blues singer on top of the field picture. With the blues singer, I created a layer mask. I turned the opacity to 100% and proceeded to clear out everything I didn't want in the final photo. I than changed the opacity on my soft tipped paint brush to 50% to give the singer a ghostly feel. I then selected and added two slaves working in the field. (On the suggestion of the class I made them larger and moved them more toward the front) I think for today to complete the assignment I will add more musicians to the piece.

Composition:

I am sticking with the blue color scheme because it is the only color that I felt best expressed the mood I am trying to accomplish in my piece. The slaves are in black and white to express the ghosts of our past. The singer is semi-transparent because he is channeling the spirit of those ghosts through his music. I am going to add a glow to the slaves and more musicians to drive home the meaning of the piece in the coming class.

Concept:

I gave up on my free standing sculpture and this piece is the result of that. In both pieces, I wanted to show how the past and the present aren't two separate entities. What happens in the past has a direct effect on who we are today and who we become tomorrow. We still face the same struggles as our ancestors did.
In this piece, I wanted to show how the mournful songs of the slaves directly influenced modern music whether it is Blues, Hip-hop or Rap.

Week Three

Assignment:
We had to create a Mash-up/Collage of at least one Lincoln Era Image and one of our own. I did one Phototshop piece and one free-standing sculpture.

Craft:
For the Photoshop piece, I selected the two images. I then adjusted the color in the Flag Photo to match the Lincoln photo. I adjusted Lincoln, resized him, and created a layer mask so I could take out the background without destroying the original image.
For the sculpture, I selected a few Lincoln pieces and a few contemporary pieces. I adjusted the color in photoshop(Lincoln images red and my images blue). I than printed and taped them to the hat of Abraham Lincoln. (The final piece will have it better attached.)

Composition:
I chose to do a sculpture because I knew it would stand out in a class full of flat images. My photoshop piece if I were to redo it I would get a clearer wormseye shot of the tank and a flag in the background. That way when I put Lincoln in the photo it looks as though we are looking up toward the greatest commander-in-chief our country has ever known.

Concept:
For the sculpture, I wanted the inside of the hat to represent the "real" Lincoln. I put pictures of him as a young man, with his family, and finally as president inside the hat. The hat represents the "Lincoln the Idol" who has lost touch with the real man. That shows Lincoln in the mass culture. The images on the outside of the hat are to represent the modern times and how we as a society still face the same challenges as Lincoln did in his time.
If you want you could say that we need to spend less time glorifying the idol and more time focusing on the man if our society is to learn and advance from those problems that haunted Lincoln as well as us.