Kelli Crockett Final Portfolio Additions

 

Under The Influence

 

Under the Influence- Brooke Hockspiel

 

My images were inspired by Monica Carvalho, who takes two images and combines them in an "extraordinary way". I wanted to take things we see in every day life, such as streets, dogs, and coffee cups and add a unique take on them.

Under the Influence_Eloi Solis

 

 

 

Under the Influence - Kelli Crockett

 

 Under the Influence - My version of Eiko Ojala

 Under the Influence Artist Research

Monic Carvalho, also known as mofart_photomontages on Instagram, has built up a strong portfolio of photo collages that mix up fantasy and reality. She has gained over 136 thousand followers on instagram, and has worked numerous companies and projects before. Her work of compositing photography with everyday objects and out of the box scenes, is an interesting visual to many. 

Her work blends things we use/ eat everyday like ice cream, bagels, bridges, etc; and mixes them into scenes that we see everyday as well. Mixing two common but different subjects together to find a common ground. One work she throws together someone taking a bite of a bagel and the cornelius of an eye. You can tell its not real of course, and she purposefully makes it look edited, rather than super realistic. I think this type of look works for her style, as it seems playful and light hearted. You can tell her work is creative and has thought put into it, aiming to be unique from other composite works. 

Like other photoshop composite artists, her work is meant to be joyful, eye catching, and not political at all. Most of her work does not critique anything about life or have any philosophical meaning. One of her works combines an ice cream cone and a path in the woods, which are two completely different topics that have no common theme. However, some of her works include female breasts mixed with tunnels are arches. They don't have a serious tone, but it does bring about the topic of the male gaze and the physique of a female body. 

https://www.monicamofart.com/ 

Under the Influence of Irene Liebler

The photographer that I wish to emulate for the Under the Influence project is Irene Liebler. She is a fine art photographer and Photoshop seems like a vital part of her digital compositions and I will be focusing on her series The Man in the Red Jacket. This specific series captured my attention because the series is very lively and colorful. 

 

Irene’s use of vibrant colors, dramatic lighting and composition give her work a very surreal narrative to them. Even though they are still images there is a lot of movement within her compositions. On this particular series she uses somewhat muted but still interesting backgrounds, this allows the subject to really stand on the frame. 

 

Her photoshop technique is very pristine. The way she places the layers on top of each other and the attention to detail make it seem as if the shot was taken as it is shown. Even the over saturation in the red jacket is intended to bring the subject forward in space and it serves as a guide to the missing/replaced element from the individual.

Erik Johansson

ERIK JOHANSSON

For my inspirational artist, I choose to pick Erik Johansson. The reason for choosing this person as my artist was because I wanted to try and find someone that would have an amazing portfolio with lots of nicely composed images. I usually tend to look at more VFX artists that do digital compositing for films and movies but seeing Erik’s portfolio and seeing his creations gave me a far more inspiring feel for this project. His portfolio usually consists of surreal photography with scale composting. A Lot of his work deals with having very bright themes to dark themes with the lighting okaying a big role in his composites to match the energy of the composite. 

The composition of his work is what really wanted me to pick him for inspiration, the look and feel of each image give off a chilling feel with the images really having a nice look and color to them. The scenes that are made up are quite unreal but the way he works with the lighting and scaling of each image makes it look much real. His photos usually have one or two subjects in the frame which seem to have a central focal point in the composition with a very strong sense of scale within the subjects accompanied by a very strong light source to give it more depth. I also love how he is able to show us some of the processes that go into making these photos and because they take a very long time to make and are only composed of images and none of the items are computer-generated he only makes about less than 10 images a year. One of my favorite photos of his is a picture of an island in the middle of an ocean that has little cranes and construction trucks fixing up the island which also has buildings on top of it. The images seem to represent the daily life of people and them interacting with normal objects but with a twist to them, not really random but not the usual. I love the range that he has with a lot of his work as well some being the very close distance from the frame or either a very wide range.

For me, this looks very amazing and I would love to try and not replicate one of his images but get something close to what he has made in terms of getting the right composition and beautiful lighting effects that he has made. I want to create something very creative just like him but make it really pop and show the skills that I have. I would really like to do something with a scale similar to his because there are many things that are very small that we tend to overlook and seeing them very large can be a very big eye-opener to us once we see them large. 

Monica Carvalho- Brooke Hockspiel

 

For my artist, I chose Monica Carvalho. Monica Carvalho explores photoshop photography featuring split images that combine two different people or things together. Her motto is to “make the ordinary extraordinary”. In most of her works, she combines people with objects or landscapes. More specifically, she does a lot of work with eyes, splitting a person’s eye with a beautiful lake or even as simple as a person’s pupil split with a person’s head. She also does work with lips, splitting up the bottom lip with a top landscape or in another work where she splits the lip in half vertically and makes half of it a leaf. She has also done some work with dogs and food. In one of her dog pieces, a dog can be seen as a part of a mountain. In a food piece, she has an ice cream cone being part of a railroad track .

Formal elements in her work are what truly makes it unique. All of her works of art are featured in color, and they all have a certain hue to it. She often leans towards cool colors since she uses a lot of photographs of water such as beaches or lakes. However, she also has some warm colors especially in her photographs featuring lips, to further blend in with the pink and red tones of lips. Compositionally, she manages to balance out everything with careful placement and editing in photoshop. 

Her work is often simply exploring beauty in both humans and nature. One work that’s really unique is Creativi-tree. Playing off the word Creativity, Carvalho features a closed eyelid, and underneath the lid there is an extensive tree and mountain landscape. It’s very mystic and beautiful. The eyebrow of the woman balances out the top of her eyelid with the bottom of this very lush and detailed landscape. Another work she created is called Lip Glass. Lip glass features a woman’s deep red lips, where the top half is her lip and the bottom half is a wine glass. The way that she blends the bottom photo with the top photo of the woman makes the piece almost appear as if it’s happening in real life. Lastly, another great piece she has created is called Whiskey on the Rocks. It features a dog who has been transformed into a mountain. Through the use of blending, she makes the dogs fur appear to be a part of the mountain behind him. She is very intentional about her photographs, making the backgrounds of the photographs similar colors to the landscape that it is going to be a part of. 

Lissy Elle Laricchia - Kelli Crockett

 

For my Under the Influence series, I decided to emulate Lissy Elle Laricchia's work. Though she has several different series in her portfolio, I was most attracted to her more demure, mysterious figures. She creates surreal female figures through compositing, usually using a muted atmospheric palette. The common subjects include women, dresses, flowers, plants, insects, and landscapes. I chose to create work like this because it will help me grow as an artist and improve upon the skills I have developed in this class. These photos use Photoshop by integrating the figure into different backgrounds and adding different motion elements to them, like the cups flying in the air or the sense of defying gravity. In my own paintings and photos, I enjoy having female figures as subjects in muted color palettes, so this will help me to develop a greater understanding of how formal elements of the composition can be manipulated to enhance the overall look of the piece.

What strikes me as so unique about her work is the feeling of being in a cool, humid, unnatural place. All of her work is so well composed with alluring and cohesive color palettes, usually consisting of natural tones that would be found in nature. To create a magical scene, she utilizes clouds, mist, and romantic lighting around her subjects. This combines with surreal elements like unhinged gravity or unreal gatherings of insects/flowers/etc to make the photos seem other-worldly. Her photos usually have a wide, low-contrast light source or a strong, one-sided light source. This helps bring depth to her compositions by choosing to integrate or separate the figure from the environment they are placed in. The use of harsh shadows will be difficult to emulate while also maintaining an even histogram, but I think this will be a welcome challenge and something I could improve upon based on my previous work for this class. There also seems to be a sense of perfect balance in her photos, rather than following the golden ratio or rule of thirds compositional rules. The figures are usually central and any other central elements are evenly distributed throughout the picture plane. This unnaturally perfect arrangement of elements adds to the unreality of the photos as well. This artist doesn't really incorporate short depths of field in her work, either. Instead, she keeps most parts of the photo in full focus while capitalizing on plain, calm backgrounds in order to establish focus and depth in the figure. This adds to the calming nature of the photos as well as puts them in an environment that feels a bit dreamy and like it was both posed and accidental in creation. She also incorporates a sense of movement in each of her photos, where your eye is drawn to. This can be the hair and dress of an unbalanced figure, the cups being tossed in the air, or the wings of the butterflies in flight. I like that the motion isn't always the central figure, but sometimes an element surrounding the figure, acting upon the figure. It is unique and a bit unnerving for the human in the photo to be so eerily still while the innate or natural parts of the composition are full of life.

In order to achieve this kind of feel in my own photos, I will have to do extensive planning to make sure the composite parts all work together cohesively. I would love to do some kind of photo in the gardens on campus to utilize natural light, like in her photo of the girl floating upwards. I would also like to experiment with artificial lighting and silhouettes for a photo, like in the photo of the hands inside the dress. Her work includes a range of focuses, from hands to portraits to full figures. This gives me a lot of room to decide what would be the most important element to focus on in my photos. I like this take on creative portraiture because it is very symbolic and detached for a portrait. The women are more of stand-ins for an idea rather than the photos being a personal commentary on the people in them. Most of the women are expressionless, posed unnaturally, and with the surrounding elements of the photo acting upon them as the motion in the photo. This is so unnatural for portraiture in my opinion that it adds to the ethereal sense of unbelonging Laricchia captures in the photos.

Solis Motion Portrait

I have been at UNC Charlotte for six years working on my BFA and I did two years in community college so I wanted to kind of incorporate that into my concept for this project. I found my acceptance letter into the art program here at UNCC and decided to turn it into a paper boat. My idea was to portray the many years I've spent in school in a way that appeared as if I wasn't getting nowhere.

Top Flight Busters!

 

For my assignment I decided to go with a ghostbusters theme.  Me and Girlfriend dressed up as ghostbusters and decided to save the world.   I took pictures from old and combined them with something new and tried to keep the scene and lighting as close as possible to something foggy and luminous.  

 

For my transformative video, I wanted to capture a scene where the world is in chaos and there is smoke coming from afar while I try and escape. 

Kelli Crockett Transformative Video Portrait

 

For my Transformative Video Portrait project, I chose to do a portrait of my friend, Jane. She is an artist and always has her head in the clouds imagining what beautiful thing she wants to create next. In order to illustrate this, I had her pose in front of a blue screen with balloons. I edited in a warm pink cloud background, scattered snow, a lens flare, and some camera sway into this footage to give the illusion that she is flying through the sky in amazement.

Transformative Portrait- Brooke Hockspiel

 

For my project, I wanted to show myself playing the piano on the beach. To me, the two most relaxing things are playing the piano and laying on the beach so I wanted to put this in a scenario together. I also wanted to provide an effect of the sun passing through the image, which is what I did with an effect in After Effects.

Motion Portrait

Video of our football team after winning in Overtime against Rice!!! Some players were emotional, some were excited, and the student section rushed the field to celebrate with the team! Amazing moment to be down there on the field. The crowd was cheering the entire time and the team made some key plays to win the game. 

 

Brooke Hockspiel Night Prowler

 

For my project, I wanted to explore some long exposures of fireworks that I took.