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.

 

Duane Michaels Creative Responses

 Two weeks ago, I conducted a small photo-shoot around my house and have produced three creative responses to Duane Michaels which all have varying themes.

 This first set consists of shots of my home street with power lines in view to convey the literal connection between the images—power lines connect from post to post to transmit bulk electricity from substations across the grid. I hadn't realised that these photos would all work so well together 'til I had looked at them altogether in the folder that these photos were stored in.

 As I scrolled through them, thinking of what to do with them, I noticed this pattern. There were two other images that would have fit the bill, although they would have stuck out like sore thumbs and would break this rule of six images I am applying for this creative response. That, and there weren't many fascinating or unique qualities about the images themselves to begin with.

 This second set consists of photos—despite the first—of the branches of my willow tree in my front garden, all taken from different angles. I chose to take these images in ways in which it could almost be pieced together like a puzzle, but not quite. The complexity of a willow tree is hard to put together in bits and pieces, and its beauty comes from its complex and chaotic nature.

 I also chose to take a different compositional approach to this series by having parts of the tree dangling before the lens and others acting as an outline to the image, namely in the second, fifth and sixth images—reading left to right from top to bottom. If I were to arrange them to form an image close to what it could actually look like, I would remove the first photo, put the fourth at the top in the centre, then have the second below and to the left, then the third image next to that, before having the sixth image beneath the second and finally the fifth image below the third.

 Finally, I have a shoot containing animals. The first two and the fourth are of my kitten Rudy, sitting at a few months over a year old, the fifth is of my eldest cat Patches, sitting around eight years old, and the sixth is of my dog Priscilla, around the same age as Patches. As I usually muck about with my photo-shoots, I decided to snap quick photos of them and go about my business back to my shooting, although I found that these images work quite well together, so I decided to make them their own series.

 The third image is a grim and disturbing photo, it being of the carcase of a mouse my kitten Rudy had presumably killed. I rediscovered the carcase recently and it has since lost all solid form. I decided that it would make for a good image in this series to convey that whilst these animals are domesticated and friendly, they still have hunting abilities and are still capable of murder.

Tyler Spangler Creative Response [TABLET EDITION]

 

 For my second creative response, I have revisited Tyler Spangler's style and have recreated my original response piece to be a lot more eccentric and colourful as is Spangler's work. I have taken personal artistic liberties so accentuate features and use more vibrant, sharp and contrasting colours as well as being more messy and rushed as to produce a grimier result which I am very pleased with.

 To produce this, I took the original PSD file, imported it into FireAlpaca on my tablet, created a new palette with different colours from the original piece, began with lineart, went over it again to refine it, moved to flat colours, then moved to the details. After the details, I recoloured them from a dark crimson reddish purple to bright turquoise to contrast the hot pink rather than transition from it into shading. I then selected dark blue for the shadows and bright yellow for the highlights which I added frantically and sporadically where I saw it, namely creating brush strokes in abstract places.

 I finished it off by drawing a rough outline of my cutout in the background with hot pink, then another quicker and messier outline in yellow before doing one more in dark blue. I finally added the turquoise background, erased some of my edges quickly for an added rough and gritty effect, and finally exported it as it is now. I am very proud of my work here and I feel this is a great step forward to what I really want to create.

 I've learned that I don't have to be precise and to always take my time in order to produce beautiful work, rather I have to have the will and compassion. Often times a time limit allows for a more beautiful expression of work as you don't have the time to think of a filter that'll limit it to what your audience wants to see, rather you're making it with only yourself in mind.

Dela Deso Creative Response [TABLET EDITION]

 

 After a few weeks of waiting, getting an email about my order being cancelled, a few more days of waiting, re-ordering and then another few days, I finally have my tablet. I actually received it proper back on the fourth of November but was unable to come in to photography 'til now due to headaches, nausea and oversleeping.

 Finally, however, I've been able to come in and produce work. The first piece I have created is a simpler, refined version of my previous Dela Deso recreation. In this case, I used FireAlpaca and used custom brushes for both the lineart and the colouring in. I used several layers for the colours, including a template colour, then a colour mask—this being the yellow & orange in the eyes, the periwinkle & purple in the skin and the light magenta & crimson red makeup. The eye itself is comprised of four colours layered atop one another in a decreasing size to replicate the layers of an eye—iris and pupil. In this case, the iris is three shades of blue that get lighter as they reach the middle, with the pupil being hot pink to conflict with the blues.

 The lineart was initially done in medium gray to stand out from the black and white background, then once it was finished, I enabled alpha lock and coloured it in black before continuing to the colouring. As with before, I based my use of colours on a clown rendition illustration of myself.

 Overall, I am happy with how this turned out and am excited to see how my Spangler and Kent recreations will turn out.