Sylvia's Digital Imaging Blog

 I took some pictures of my statue to play with in Photoshop. I considered adding a ton more mirror shards to the statue itself, but decided it was time to start incorporating digital imaging into the piece.

 Trying to think of a reason for creating this statue, I definitely had a subconscious reason behind this piece, and a faint idea of how to express it.  It's about my complicated relationship with my face and mirrors.  I had struggled with severe acne for about six years, starting from the tender age of 14.  It was something that sadly influenced me a lot as I was growing up and through my teen years.  Over the years it created a lot of self-hatred, low self-esteem, and depression.  Things that even now, although my skin is doing much better, still effect me and that I am still insecure about.   Gradually throughout those years of really disliking my face, I had taught myself to avoid looking into reflective surfaces, or looking at myself in full light.  After so much time this behavior became second nature, and even though I feel a lot better about my face now, I still find myself turning on the low light, or trying to avoid reflections. Whi...

 This week I was able to get a bunch of my work done on the "statue".  I think it turned out pretty good, a little less shapely than my sketch, but that was to be expected when working with hot glue.   I made rings of hot glue to stack on each other to build up the statue, and I think this method worked pretty well. Now I have to incorporate digital work into this piece, I have a couple ideas on how to do that.  I may take some photos of the piece on a plain background so that I can manipulate it in Adobe, try to make it look more ethereal and less clunky, play with blending layers and such.  My other idea was to upload a photo of the statue but keep most of it photo-realistic, and edit in little fragments of a face into the mirror shards.

 My first idea is to make a hot glue "statue" of a human figure with shards of mirror exploding from the head.  Hot glue may seem a weird material, but I've been using it for years to create 3D objects.   This initial idea may be the one that I run with, I'm still uncertain.

 These are some of the finals, from 7am to 7pm. As I said in my previous post, the deadline is too tight for me to be able to finish a full 24-hr book. so I have tried to at least finish 12 hours.

 I'm starting to feel nervous, the due date is quickly coming up and I'm not finished with my work.  The unfortunate reality is that I will have to sacrifice quality to try and get it done in time. While this images aren't exactly as I would have them, I think they are a good starting point and will have to do.

 I started this project by taking pictures of myself about every hour - not the most fun task taking unflattering, head-on photos, but once I started collaging them together it started looking less weird. Here are the first two, these are mostly experimental but I may use them if they work well.  The first is 7am and the second is 8am. Also, I have decided that the printed book will be small - 6 x 6 inches.

 After having some time to think about the assignment and what might be both a fun and creative project, I think I have found my idea!  I intend to make a small spiral-bound book, bound so that the pages can go 360 degrees around.  The book will have 24 pages, one for each hour of the day.  There will be no set start or end to the book, it will be a day cycle so you could open at any page and go through it.  For each hour (page) I'm thinking it will be a self portrait of sorts of how I'm feeling in that hour.  I'll take a few self portrait photos of the hour and paste them together collage-style.  For the backgrounds I would like to use abstract color to represent the feel of the hour. I hope that made even a little sense!

 Here is a quick sketch from my initial idea while listening to Prof. Ed explain the project. My process usually begins like this, I get an idea while learning the project, sketch it down, and revise or completely redo the idea from there. This sketch is meant to be about the sort of Yin-Yang relationship between positive and negative things (my initial two things were summer and winter, but then changed to dream vs reality). This is still a super rough idea, I'm not sure it is enough of a narrative.

 For these iterations, I really tried to let myself go, work quickly and without overthinking things.  I think some of them turned out quite interesting and it was nice to see where my brain goes without direction. I tried to stray away from the center composition, but I still find that the images I have seem to cater towards a more centered composition.

 I used imagery of plants, Mayan calendars, stars, the Egyptian Goddess Isis, who is the goddess of life, and a lot of repetitive circular shapes in these first iterations.  This was my first time using the photos I had taken specifically for the project, and I'm very happy with the results. By the end of these iterations I had a ton of layers, making it very difficult to work and signifying that maybe I should move on to a new batch of iterations. In another batch of iterations I went for a wackier/sillier approach on a "time goddess".  This bunch of images still incorporates my original images of flowers and a body along with clocks, stars and galaxies, and in addition a pair of butterfly wings.

 After speaking with Professor Ed and knowing that he would prefer us use our own images, I went on another photoshoot. I needed a "time goddess" image, so I posed myself in a sort of meditation pose (as my draft used) to manipulate in PhotoShop.  Here are the three that I will be working with. I also collected some flower photos to hopefully mask out and add.