Mentis Imperium, et Lunam, et Pastor

  The final stretch of my surreal photography project was not as ambitious as I had hoped, but on the brighter side I got to convey a different, more abstract story from Officium Parabolam in Et Luna, et Pastor. The entire project altogether feels a little mismatched, and this is mistakenly due to me working on these completely separately from one another. For future personal projects akin to this, I will work on both halves at once so they have continuity and consistency in their themes and quality.

 Despite this, I have created three unique illustrations on three photographs for the first half, and have photographed six different paper set constructions and adjusted them in Photoshop for the second half. Inspired by Officium Parabolam, the second half features a familiar setting, albeit less detailed. For the sake of making things interesting I retained the Latin titles, with Mentis Imperium meaning "mind control"—the main theme of "HIJACK" which inspired the hands/fingers triptych—and Et Luna, et Pastor meaning "the shepherd and the moon".

 There's a certain aura that the second half of this project gives me which I could only ascribe to one song; The Shepherd and the Moon by Aphrodite's Child. Music often helps me in producing my work by helping me slip into various emotions and re-contextualise my ideas and make something new out of them. If I worked on these pieces in complete silence and had no exterior influence past my chosen theme and artists, I fear my work would have been terribly bland and uninspired. The sheer power and force behind music and emotions helps drive me to push the quality of my work to a fuller degree, and I really feel that in this project, namely in the first half.

 Finally, here are the total nine images that conclude this project.

Finger Friends - The Handy-Dandy Triptych

 After about a month's gap between posts, I've created a third piece to create a triptych of hand / finger-themed pieces using mixed media of photography and digital illustration. These have been appropriately resized and cropped to print horizontally on an A3 sheet at 300dpi.

 This first piece was produced with the intent of introducing the theme in a very simplistic manner, using a few basic shades of grey off the bat. The hands feature no detail aside from the fingernails and the occasional crease. In later pieces, this was rectified and done to an almost uncanny and nauseating degree to hammer in the theme of unease and mystique. I also used elements of childlike wonder in using your fingers to act as little people on items such as your table or books, but to a much larger, absurder scale.

 This second piece is my personal favourite as I feel it perfectly encapsulates the feeling of absurdity and confusion I was going for. These "fingers-friends" all act independent of each other and are off doing their own things, i.e. one's stepping from one car to another, one's stepping from one chimney to another, one's sliding down a rooftop, &c.

 Finally, this third piece was created to fully push the theme of surrealism and chaos by having various forms of these "finger-friends" altogether, i.e. the large bug-antenna-eye-esque one in the sky, the regular ones on the roof and on the pavement, and the spider made of fingers crawling down the alley.

 To help tie these three images together, I used the aesthetic of the first image in the "finger-spider" by not detailing wrinkles or creases, but instead having just fingernails, as well as light and dark fingernails. Most of them have skin tones slightly darker than the tone of the fingernails to replicate that of human fingers, but I decided to vary it for another slightly level of absurdity.

 Next up, I will be constructing a series of photos using basic constructions made of paper and ink, as seen in my first post, Officium Parabolam. I will be taking a much more sophisticated and educated approach to this series of photos by making full use of the materials I have at home. I plan to use a variety of paper, from A3 card to thin, flimsy A4 lined notebook paper.

 The card will likely be used for the walls for stability, with the lined paper for details such as the floorboards or miniature pieces of paper. Wherever appropriate, I will add detail using ink or graphite, i.e. on the miniature papers, the doors, the floors, the walls or potentially the ceilings.

 For each "set", I will take a photo of the full set and document the process, i.e. setting it up, getting the lighting, creating illustrations for each piece, &c. I plan to use both natural and artificial lighting for this part of the project and utilise my bluetooth colour-changing lightbulb to create different tones for each picture. Wherever possible, too, I will use my phone's flashlight at varying levels of brightness fitting for each set, i.e. indoors, looking through a doorway to the outside world, &c.

 Overall, I'm pleased with how this part of the project has come out and I'm excited to introduce the second act and experiment with different sets.

Hands - Two Pieces

My final photography project involves combining photographic and illustrative methods to create surreal pieces. My chosen theme for these said surreal pieces are hands and fingers in abstract and lonesome environments that we don't pay much attention to. This is done to add an element of intrigue and mystery to these desolate locations.

 

This first piece is set in an alleyway leading into Causewayhead, with a row of houses on the left-hand side and an apartment complex on the other. Houses are less interesting to the human eye as they are so familiar to us, so I decided to add a flair of strange and otherworldly elements to them. I also found that it would be more interesting in terms of composition as the outline of the houses meant for greater possibilities of hand poses.

 This second piece was shot in the street adjacent to the alleyway of the previous piece, showcasing the row of houses that lay ahead of the previous row. This is due to the road beforehand splitting off into two, with the other route seen in the previous piece. I decided that because this was a denser, more populated area, I would add more of these hand-like creates in the form of two fingers.

 This idea came from the concept of using my index and middle fingers to act as human legs and walk around with them, a very abstract and whimsical, childlike idea which is implemented beautifully into this piece. To better vary the tones of the image, I used both light and dark skin tones on the hands, with lighter tones on the fingernails and no shading to provide a more otherworldly and abstract look. This also helps them stand out from the piece more.

 If I had the talent and ability, I would have digitally painted these on top to make them seem as though they were real. For now, that is a mere concept, but I am more than happy with how this piece turned out. The third piece will feature a similar idea, likely combining the previous two, in an even more abstract and open location.

Photography Plan

The plan for my photography course involves working harder in the appropriate environment for me to produce pieces in my chosen theme. Working at home has tanked my inspiration, creativity and motivation for this course as I feel less driven to work among my distractions and other hobbies and occupations. Working alongside other students grants me the will to work in the first place as the surroundings both call for and are better fit for it.

 

 First, I will be catching up on my current project by producing sketches on top of my chosen photographs before moving on to full digital illustrations alongside annotated screenshots. These pieces will be in the same vein as one of my previous pieces; drawings of giant hands / monsters / creatures atop my photos. These chosen photos are of houses and streets that we often pay little attention to when we walk through or past them. My goal with this project is to add a flair of mystery to these lonesome and plain spaces.

 I have created a small to-do list for when I come back, and it goes as follows:

• Create sketches for future pieces
• Work out colour palettes for pieces
• Do lineart and colours fully per piece
• Take screenshots and document progress
• Collate into collage Duane Michaels-esque

 One of my lecturers has also created a helpful, detailed page regarding my plan coming back into college.

More Duane Michaels

I have taken various photos of mundane and lacklustre areas which we don't often pay attention to whilst passing through; areas that are unfamiliar to us or that have no quality that fascinate or capture us. For example, my back garden, the coombe to the roundabout, the laneway into town. These are examples of areas we may pass by or co-exist around but do not pay much mind to because they are bland and only act as dead ends or merely paths from point A to point B.

 I started with my back garden using my small point-and-shoot camera and took photos around the garden. This first photo is in the same location as seen in "HIJACK", albeit not pointed upwards.

 I then moved on to the path toward my back garden's gate and took a photo looking down that path. I really love the shapes in this image, i.e. the side of my house on the left—almost framing the image—the house behind the fence, the poles, wooden poles and the wheelie bin stretching up from the ground.

 These shapes are blocky, chunky and simple and breed more life into the complex and detailed environment, i.e. the plants at the back, the decorations on the wall, the little pebbles and rocks in the back and the fancy wooden fence.

 I then moved further outside up the path towards my college campus and took photos around the street. This was the one that stood out to me compositionally, although it's unfortunately a very low quality due to the camera I used and it being shot quickly in a passing walk.

 These photos were taken another day on my phone which, whilst often lower in resolution than the highest settings of my point-and-shoot camera, captured light a lot better and came out a lot sharper, especially after editing them in Photopea.

 Another area that I often pass through but never pay much mind to is this laneway into Causeway Head. A row of old houses sit on the left-hand side behind cobbled walls along a pathed pathway adjacent to a large apartment complex.

 Not that visually stimulating after a while, and passing through it often just makes it a slog to walk through. Aesthetically, this is a very unique area, as the photo below helps demonstrate.

 This last photo was taken on the street on the other side of the cobble walls seen in the previous photo. As the street begins with a fork in the road, I took a right to take said previous photo, whereas this photo was taken on the left side. This street is chock full of modelled houses with bay windows, rows of chimneys and organised front gardens.

 Whilst this area is also aesthetically pleasant, it feels more lifeless to walk through. All the houses look identical in shape and colour, all with their curtains and nets drawn. These houses all stand proudly next to one another like they're going to war, but with them looking so identical, it's hard to get a sense of life or character out of them. I will attempt to incorporate this empty, cold feeling into my illustrative elements within this project wherever appropriate.

RUDY - Second Piece Screenshots

 Unfortunately, I worked under the impression that I had saved this piece as an image file and would be able to include it here. Due to this impression, I took screenshots of my work, imported them into PowerPoint, annotated them and saved them as JPG files. The actual .MPD file containing my illustrative work has not been saved. I ended up deleting the .MPD file as I assume it had been saved somewhere, yet I went to look for it today—January 8th, 2021—and came up empty handed. I searched my entire drive and my OneDrive folders for the final piece but to no avail.

 Without redrawing the entire piece from scratch, I'm afraid that it is lost to time. The only remains of it are these annotated screenshots. As compensation for this loss, I will have to create the next two pieces of a remarkably higher quality. I have already created the template for the second piece which I will have to remake now as well as make a start on the third piece. My original intent was to have three pieces, but it will likely only be two at this rate.

HIJACK - First Piece

For my first piece, I have selected one photograph from my previous shoot and have created an illustrative atop it before making fine-tune adjustments in Photoshop such as exposure, saturation and cropping. Screenshots and further explanations of the process and of my thoughts are detailed below.