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 - 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/ 

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.