Digital Collage
Title: Obscuration
Medium: Digital collage Size: 61cm X 91cm Date: September 14th Exhibition Text
Obscuration is a piece that I created using a Photoshop program called Adobe Photoshop CS6. It utilizes the color contrast of The Wedding Supper by Gerrit Van Honthorst. and uses the nature aspect of nature from Identity by Torie Tiffany to display a sense of mystery. |
Meaning
Ever since I could remember I was involved one way or another in sports. Whether it would be football, basketball, or baseball I was always active outside. I guess I have always liked the fact that you can be yourself and nobody will judge you. Most people find that sports is a way to express themselves and be able to to something they like to do. They like the interaction with people and are open up to people on the same team. That's the same reason why I liked sports which was to interact with people and compete. However I am a different person when I play sports than when I am doing something else like going to school. In sports I am quite outgoing and very open but if I go to school I just really keep to myself a lot. That's what I wanted to portray in my piece.
I wanted to show the way that some people are totally different when it comes to sports. They become more and more comfortable with the team they are on so they open up and be who they are because they know that there teammates won't judge. So to display this way that some people including me are when it comes to sports I decided to grab a few sports pictures and decided to put them in the background and decided I wanted a background to cover them so that they were barely visible. It gives a shadow like appearance to the piece. This represented the way many people including myself are by only opening up in sports and not anywhere else. I just want to create something that people can relate to and be able to understand that they can be themselves whenever they want.
I wanted to show the way that some people are totally different when it comes to sports. They become more and more comfortable with the team they are on so they open up and be who they are because they know that there teammates won't judge. So to display this way that some people including me are when it comes to sports I decided to grab a few sports pictures and decided to put them in the background and decided I wanted a background to cover them so that they were barely visible. It gives a shadow like appearance to the piece. This represented the way many people including myself are by only opening up in sports and not anywhere else. I just want to create something that people can relate to and be able to understand that they can be themselves whenever they want.
Essay
Being the oldest one in the family puts a good amount of pressure on someone and that someone is me. I have three younger brothers one is my twin and the other are three and six years younger than I am. So being the big brother you have look out for your younger brothers and also set an example of how to do things. I often help them out with things such as homework but mainly how to get better at sports. They would tell me let's go outside and throw a football or a baseball. So I always want to be there to help them with whatever they need.
But there was one time where I couldn't help my brother like I wanted too. It was when one of my brothers was in elementary school and during the middle of my class my teacher gets a call from my parents so I am on the phone listening to my parents and they tell me that my brother is really sick. This didn't really sink in till I went to see him in the hospital like a few days later. He stayed in the hospital for a good amount of time. Seeing him there and not being able to do anything to help him made it hard but all I could do was be there. So after that I have always tried to help him any way I can. Not just him but if any one of my brothers need something I will help them.
I feel that my parents also want me to be like that to them seeing that I am the oldest they believe that I can help them with whatever they need. I feel like that makes up most of my experiences in my life where I am trying to help someone with a sport or homework not always being my brothers. I just want to make others happy so that's really what I try to do and I will do anything that I need to do it. Being a leader on a team like baseball was a huge experience for me because I started for high school as a freshman and being a catcher you need to be the leader of the team. So when you have people that are a couple years older than you looking up to you to make decisions it puts pressure on me but I could handle it because all I want them to do is succeed.
I have really matured that season because of that and now I know that I can really just help anyone that needs it and help them succeed. I have learned a lot throughout my years and also have grown up a lot. I just really look out for my family and friends and I want all of them to succeed. I also always will be there for them no matter what especially for my brothers.
But there was one time where I couldn't help my brother like I wanted too. It was when one of my brothers was in elementary school and during the middle of my class my teacher gets a call from my parents so I am on the phone listening to my parents and they tell me that my brother is really sick. This didn't really sink in till I went to see him in the hospital like a few days later. He stayed in the hospital for a good amount of time. Seeing him there and not being able to do anything to help him made it hard but all I could do was be there. So after that I have always tried to help him any way I can. Not just him but if any one of my brothers need something I will help them.
I feel that my parents also want me to be like that to them seeing that I am the oldest they believe that I can help them with whatever they need. I feel like that makes up most of my experiences in my life where I am trying to help someone with a sport or homework not always being my brothers. I just want to make others happy so that's really what I try to do and I will do anything that I need to do it. Being a leader on a team like baseball was a huge experience for me because I started for high school as a freshman and being a catcher you need to be the leader of the team. So when you have people that are a couple years older than you looking up to you to make decisions it puts pressure on me but I could handle it because all I want them to do is succeed.
I have really matured that season because of that and now I know that I can really just help anyone that needs it and help them succeed. I have learned a lot throughout my years and also have grown up a lot. I just really look out for my family and friends and I want all of them to succeed. I also always will be there for them no matter what especially for my brothers.
Investigation
Inspiration
“Identity.” Torie Tiffany Art, torietiffanyart.com/artwork/4149876-Identity.html.
“The Wedding Supper.” Gerrit Van Honthorst - The Complete Works, www.gerrit-van-honthorst.org/The-Wedding-Supper.html.
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My inspiration for this piece was "Identity" by Torie Tiffany and "The Wedding Supper" by Gerrit Van Honthorst. Torie Tiffany is a self taught artist that was born in New York. Her famous works are being held up in different places along New York City. Torie Tiffany uses nature and the beauty of the universe in her art pieces of photography. Torie Tiffany's art was inspiring to me because of the way they portray nature and the color that is used. In my digital collage I made the green background a symbol for nature and the beauty of it. "Identity" has a tremendous of detail and natural colors which is what I tried to show. Gerrit Van Honthorst was a Dutch golden age painter and became famous for his paintings where it was artificially lit. He often depicted the tavern scenes where there were people eating, gambling , and people playing music. "The Wedding Supper" was a piece inspired from Caravaggio art which was really just intense realism. I was inspired by the dark colors and the light colors and how they collide with one another. I used darkness as a metaphor to portray mystery. I am inspired by different aspects of each of these two pieces because of the fact that they both have great techniques and unique aspects to them that I would like to incorporate in my digital collage.
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Planning
Planning Sketches
The first sketch I did was to just get down the images that I feel that I wanted on my collage. I ended up only going with the two images on the left because I feel that it was going to look the best in the end. I also labeled how I wanted to have the background which I said was like a grassy background which made it to the final product. In my sketches I like to label also what color I feel like I should make each thing and I wanted a darker color to everything so I would make notes to myself.
My second sketch was when I was experimenting on how I wanted the final product to look like using the images I created in the first sketch. This was a good example of one but I decided not to go with this one. I didn't want to have a football as the background so I decided to just make another sketch.
This is the final sketch I made and I thought that this was the perfect way that I wanted to portray what I wanted. I was open to a little changes on the way but the overall outline I was going with this. I also mention in a note to the side that it would be a dark contrast or even black and white.
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Process
1. First I became familiar with the the Adobe Photoshop CS6 program by just using random images and using the tools available to use in the program
2. Once I became well aware of what these tools did I created a new page and made the dimentions 24 by 36 and the resolution 170 3. I then decided to take a bunch of pictures and figure out ones I was going to use for my project. 4. I used the lasso tool and the quick select to select what part of the image I wanted to use. I did this for two to three pictures. 5. When I did that I found a picture where there was green grass and just pulled a section from it and then pasted it on the original document. Then I blew that image up really big to cover the whole screen. 6. I then started playing with the saturation and opacity of each picture until the image fit my needs. 7. The last thing I did was to just touch things up using the contrast feature and playing with that until I found the right fit for my art |
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Experimentation
I did a lot of experimentation when creating my work of art so I can make the best work that I can. I first thought that I wasn't going to have a background but just have the pictures faded. But I realized that I wanted a background or something to cover the pictures and I used the grass from another picture blew it up ans then made it the background. Then I started experimenting with the pictures and the ones that I wanted to show throw. I didn't know what to show just the helmet or just the big picture of my self. After spending some time figuring out what I wanted to do I figured out that I wanted to include both and just overlay them. By doing this my final product looked even better.
Critique
The overall production of my piece of artwork holds some differences and similarities with my inspiration of Gerrit Van Honthorst's work. In Honthorst's piece he often made a part lit up artificially to show emphasis on a certain part but in my collage I don't follow that aspect of his artworks. I try to use the darkness as an emphasis in my piece. Although not an emphasis for Honthorst he often has a lot of shadow in his artworks. Also both of our works of art seem to have a deeper meaning to it.
Reflection
My collage that I created took a lot of time and effort to create and I am really proud of how it turned out. It took me forever to create and figure out the right saturation, angle and opacity of each image. At first it took me a while to get used to the Photoshop program because I have ever used a program like this before. I learned how to use the tools available for Photoshop like the lasso tool and using opacity. I became pretty good st the tools that I needed t when I selected what I wanted from a picture I took it would be smooth and feathered to look nice. The hardest part in my opinion was to incorporate an artist or movement for an inspiration because of the fact that it was hard to find an artist or movement to fit my artwork. But through lots of research and hard work I could find something that incorporated what I was thinking. The fact that my artist are completely two different artists surprises me and also tells me how unique I wanted to have my artwork. Something that I could improve on is getting more pictures to choose from and to use in my picture. I feel that the more pictures that I would have gotten then my piece would be a little better. I think I did a good job with using the opacity and contrast. I kept on playing with these two features to make it fits my needs and how I envisioned my idea to look. The background of my artwork uses texture to display what grass or what nature looks like. I am proud of my work and how it turned out and fully displayed the message I wanted to give.
ACT
Clearly explain how you are able to identify the cause-effect relationships between your inspiration and its effect upon your artwork:
I am able to identify the cause-effect relationship between my inspiration and its effect upon my artwork by investigating the colors and the way that they portray the colors. It is notice that I use darker colors like such from Gerrit Van Honthorst's paintings to portray a type of mystery and sadder feel to my piece.
What is the overall approach (pov) the author (from research) has regarding the topic of your inspiration?
The main point of view that I found in my research was that of the natural aspect from Torie Tiffany's work which lead me to create a nature or natural type look in my artwork.
What kind of generalizations and conclusions have you discovered about people, ideas, cultures, etc. while you researched your inspiration?
When researching I didn't really find and generalizations and conclusions about people, ideas, and cultures because of the fact I didn't really research those aspects but Rather a specific painting or picture that inspired me when I looked at it. However I relised the fact that in Caravaggio art I brought aspects from different movement into one like baroque and realism.
What was the central idea or theme around your inspirational research?
The central idea of my research was to display nature and use metaphors in the way I portrayed color which bet fit the work of both the artists I researched. I used the fact of mystery for Honthorst's work and nature for Tiffany's work.
What kind of inferences did you make while reading your research?
I Inferred through my research that the style of Caravaggio art wasn't that popular but has been brought up by many artists and still is. So my inference that this is not as popular as certain pieces of art or movements.
I am able to identify the cause-effect relationship between my inspiration and its effect upon my artwork by investigating the colors and the way that they portray the colors. It is notice that I use darker colors like such from Gerrit Van Honthorst's paintings to portray a type of mystery and sadder feel to my piece.
What is the overall approach (pov) the author (from research) has regarding the topic of your inspiration?
The main point of view that I found in my research was that of the natural aspect from Torie Tiffany's work which lead me to create a nature or natural type look in my artwork.
What kind of generalizations and conclusions have you discovered about people, ideas, cultures, etc. while you researched your inspiration?
When researching I didn't really find and generalizations and conclusions about people, ideas, and cultures because of the fact I didn't really research those aspects but Rather a specific painting or picture that inspired me when I looked at it. However I relised the fact that in Caravaggio art I brought aspects from different movement into one like baroque and realism.
What was the central idea or theme around your inspirational research?
The central idea of my research was to display nature and use metaphors in the way I portrayed color which bet fit the work of both the artists I researched. I used the fact of mystery for Honthorst's work and nature for Tiffany's work.
What kind of inferences did you make while reading your research?
I Inferred through my research that the style of Caravaggio art wasn't that popular but has been brought up by many artists and still is. So my inference that this is not as popular as certain pieces of art or movements.
Work Cited
- “Caravaggio Style and Technique.” Artble, 19 July 2017, www.artble.com/artists/caravaggio/more_information/style_and_technique.
- “Bio.” Torie Tiffany Art, torietiffanyart.com/pdfs.html.