Blog Assignment #4

After much deliberation I finally decided to stick with the Big Idea of Reality vs. Fantasy for the final, but I am taking approaching it in a slightly different manner. For the midterm I thought about how we are bound to reality which is preventing us from living our fantasies, so I chose to incorporate images associated with being trapped, including barbed wire fence and locks. I was thinking about taking on a new big idea of light vs. darkness after looking at the examples in class, and I found I was especially interested in shadows because of the way it is a reflection of what is there but is often distorted by the angle of light. From here I realized I could use this with the reality vs. fantasy idea, where the shadow of a person is positioned in a way that is their fantasy( i.e. dancer, athlete, small, big, etc.) but having the person in the image being the reality. This also relates in a way to my midterm idea, where a person is bound to reality by their physical and biological make-up but their shadow shows who they really wish they could be. Apart from real life references and references to the examples during class, I searched for images and I came across a blog that used an image similar to what I was thinking : http://blogs.targetx.com/pbu/Sam/2009/04/you_game_part_1_1.html

More specifically this image:






The last photo is one that was taken from a website about substance abuse from athletes, so this idea is one that could easily be found in health illustrations (substance abuse, eating disorders, etc.) or even on commercials for medications for depression since the person is trapped by their physical being but is trying to break free.

In photoshop I plan to take my own images of people and either distort their shadows, or more likely use different images for the shadows. I can use the mask technique, similar to how we worked in both of the mask lessons during class where we selected the shadows and created a mask. I could also select the entire figure and fill them with black, then use the opacity settings and eraser to create the effect of a shadow. High contrasts are also going to make the shadows stand out. the compositions of the images will depend on the photographs I use, but I really like very simple compositions to keep the focus on the big idea, rather than being distracted by the background. I was also really drawn to the artist in my previous post who used strong depth of field in his work, so I could also make the background very out of focus.