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.