Pictures and ideas that have inspired me
Eugenia Loli
Eugenia Loli grew up in Greece but has lived in Germany and the UK. She has worked as a nurse, as a computer programer, and as a film maker. her inspirations come from Julien Pacaud's illistrations and also from Kieron “Cur3es” Cropper.
She creates her work sometimes with an idea of what she is going to do, but most of the time she likes to let the images fit themselves together and tell a story. She does not have any defined style as she belives that confining yourself to one particular style is "artistic death", she belives that if she has a style it's to be found in the sarcasam she usually employs in her art rather than anything visual. |
The Black Math
The Black Math is a Melbourn based artist who uses simlpe line drawings to transform the pictures of conventionaly beautiful people into artworks that focus on something entierly different from the origenal meaning of the picture, it shifts the focus from fashion.
The Black Math origenaly started out by creating blackout poems, colouring over sertain words in newspapers to create a different narative, and he progressed onto photo based adverts. He is interested identity and the subconsious which he tries to bring out in his work. |
My responses to The Black Math
To create these I used Photoshop to remove the backgrounds from the pictures and change the colour to one ore two colours (I used the gradient tool on the top right one to create an ombre effect) and I also de-saturated the people in the pictures. I then printed them out and used black and white pen to add symbols and doodles to the pictures, using the faces to help create the shapes, before scanning them back in again. I noticed that the black math occasionally uses upside down crosses and also uses a lot of triangles and intricate, small doodles. I tried to incorporate this into my work and used pictures of UFOs and symbols that looked almost occult-ish to achieve a similar effect to the one the one The Black Mass is trying to achieve in his work.
Planning my project
This project is about exploring people's identity through photography, I have decided to explore people's hobbies and how these are part of people's identities an how these make them feel, I will use the hobbies of the people who I am taking pictures of and also my own hobbies and inspirations to influence my work. I will explore my ideas through mixed media because it will allow me to be even more creative with my work and also expand my ideas using more than one technique, however I will mainly be focusing on collage as I think it is fun and also looks affective. The end result of my work will be my five favorite mixed media photography peices presented on this website.
Initial pictures
Final peices
These mixed media peices were inspired by both my hobbies and other people's, as well as techniqiues used by other artists. I used a range of techniques, such as collage and photoshop (to improve the colour balance in my photos) and I also drew on the pictures using marker pens.
For the first picture I used just marker pens to draw on the face, this gives you more of an insite into her identity as a lot of the drawings on her face are of things she likes, as are the video games, whaich are balenced on her head. Next time I would make the original picture brighter, either by using levels more on photoshop, or having the exposure time longer, just because it is hard to see some of the drawings clearly. That said, this is one of my favorite final peices because of the level of detail in the picture that I have managed to achive without making it overcrouded, and the bright, warm colours. That said this is one of my favorite pieces. |
The seccond piece I cut out sections of her arm and hair from the original picture and stuck bits of pictures I have taken in the past behind it so you can see them comming through and creating an interesting pattern. For the octopus tenticles I cut out sections of the background and stuck white paper behind it and then drew the tentacles in the spaces created by the sections I cut out of the picture. I drew them in black fine-liner, for the purple I used pencil but maybe next time I would use paint because It would look more affective. I have used some of my old pictures to create patterns within the picture to show how the work I have done in the past has inspired the things I create now and will create in the future, and how they may not be the main focus of the work they are there, influencing my work.
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For the background on this picture I used three pictures I had previously taken, which were some of my favourites. I used Photoshop to cut them to size and then stuck them down on a white background. The picture in the foreground is one I took of my friend holding a camera, I cut the lens out of the picture so you could see through to the picture behind her. This gives more depth to the image and also gives more of an idea about the identity, as it shows you more of the picture and lets you see more of what is going on. I used silver gel pen and black marker for the drawings, if I was to change something I would use a different type of black pen so it would not sink into the paper so much. This is my favourite of my final pieces because it is the most effective at conveying identity of all of my pieces.
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The penultimate picture is My least favourite, however, the bit I like best is the border because I like the way the picture is framed by the sparkly paper and then the flowers, I think this is affective, which is why I reuse the same idea in another one of my pieces. However, in the rest of this piece there is too much going on and it feels a bit busy, especially with all the different patterns. Also the face is too dark and doesn't look very good, I struggled with editing this on Photoshop. |
My inspiration for the collaged dress was Eugina Loli's work as she does something similar in hr peices, replacing clothing that was already there with patterns by cutting around the edge of the dress. I outlined the person in the picture with black fine-liner, in an attempt to make it look almost like it had been drawn, however, if I were to do this again I would not outline the shadow as I have done here. For this peice I used an Idea I liked from one of my previous peices: The boarder of sparkly paper and patterns, but instead of cutting stars out of the edges I cut the middle out of the hearts so the whole thing would be tied together and not just separate ideas all stuck together. |
When creating these I first used photoshop to enhance the pictures for when I printed them out, I then used a craft knife to cut shapes and sections out of the pictures in order to collage with colourful paper and with my old pictures. For the forth picture I used buttons to make music notes, and created the tales of the notes by cutting out the shapes with the craft knife and sticking some black patterned paper behind it. For the third picture I cut three of my pictures into thirds and stuck them one underneath the other to create a scene with three different images, I then used a craft knife to cut out the picture of the person and the lens of the camera so you could see the picture through the lens, I thought this helped unite the picture. For the last one I used a craft knife to cut out the dress she was wearing and replaced it with the rose patterned paper in by sticking the paper to the other side of the picture.
Overall I think this project was successful, my final pieces were affective and I achieved the effect I was looking for, however next time I would try to include a few more of the ideas which initially inspired me, such as using scrabble letters in my collages, and using the idea of face paint to a greater extent. I also would have used typography more as I found this really affective and entertaining, however, at the time we didn't have space or room. I like the look of the dress being replaced by the patterns in the last one, this was one of my favourite techniques that Eugenia Loli used in her works. I think also that the black ink drawings on the third piece are very aesthetically pleasing and add extra interest to the picture, taking inspiration from The Black Math, they help link it together. Finally, something that I think would make the works more complete is if I linked them all together in some way, either by using a particular technique on all of them or making the images tell a story as one mass, rather than as individual pieces of art.