There are some people in the world, such as myself, who can't function when they wake up until they have a cup of coffee. My thoughts aren't coherent, like they're swimming around in my head, until that first cup of joe. I attempted to depict that incoherent dreamy state through this scale & proportion project.
Post-critique commentary:
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately, I did not start with a concept that helped form the composition. I knew that I wanted to have a person swimming in coffee but there wasn't a deeper conceptual meaning behind it like there should have been before creating this project. It's difficult to try and write up a possibility for concept to fit what you have already created because you have to address all aspects of the image and try not to contradict yourself. I placed the body in a diagonal form to sort of mirror the hand. Danny said that he liked the spiral that the hand cupping the mug created.
The individual images that create this composition were all photographed in tungsten lighting inside of my home. With other images the warm lighting would be something I would fix with color balance in Photoshop or CameraRaw but for this project it really played into the concept. When you drink coffee it gives you a warm feeling and it also coincides with the color of a coffee stain. The textures that I added on top of the final image enhanced the overall warm tone of this project.
Actually putting my brother into the coffee was quite the Photoshop challenge for me. The 7 different body parts of my brother were pulled from 7 individual images. I had a difficult time with making sure the limbs were proportional to one another and also fitting them inside of the cup was quite the challenge. The next challenge I had once all of the limbs were placed inside of the cup was to make it look like he was submerged underwater. I photographed the 7 individual images with my brother inside of a bathtub full of water. Since the water was clear when I put the pieces into Photoshop it was difficult to make those parts look submerged. At first I tried simply using levels to darken the edges of the limbs but that was not working mainly because I couldn't get the different layers and levels to have the underwater look. I finally figured out that putting a layer mask on each of the limbs was the way to go. I masked out the edged 10% at a time to not only get rid of the hard edge but to also give the limbs depth. Using a layer mask allowed the texture of the coffee to lay on top of the parts to solidify the submerged look.
Overall, I'm excited about how my project turned out. There are a few minor details that I'm going to go back and address before printing it onto canvas such as: adding ripples of coffee around the limbs and also adding motion blur to the hands and maybe even the feet. While I go back and make these few adjustments I'm also going to reconsider what potential meanings this project has.