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.

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.

Isabella Gagliardo - Under the Influence

Under The Influence - April Lin

Under the Influence: Erik Almås

Erik Almås is a digital photographer that uses photoshop in some of his works. He shoots lots of landscapes, as well as portraits, but he also has a collection of digital composites that I find particularly appealing. He was born in Norway but moved to San Francisco to pursue a career in sports photography. During college, he found a new passion for creating great composite images.

In terms of content, Almås generally uses a figure in the foreground. Typically they are interacting with some feature, such as an animal, an object, a vehicle, or a combination of animal and something else (such as a mounted animal, or a whale-turned-blimp). The background typically tells the story though, showing some hint as to the situation the figure finds themself in, and the story about the unfold (or the story that is just about to unfold). A great pattern in his pictures is the addition of clouds.

In terms of technique, Almås often uses low natural lights throughout to show his surreal landscapes. His colors are well coordinated. His pictures either employ a vivid saturation or a lower desaturation. His surreal lighting goes to great lengths when paired with one of these color methods.

Under the Influence Inspiration - April Lin

Under The Influence Inspiration- Kristen Campbell