This was an addictive assignment! I began by setting the basic parameters of exclusively using images taken in 2025 from my own camera roll, and see if I could pastiche them together to create new meaning. Since these images have come from the past year, they're attached to recent memories and communications, and to have them come together in a surreal collage mimics, for me, what my dreams literally tend to be made of.
I specifically wanted to use Procreate, because I want to get more familiar with it. Many of my high school students used it, and I had never used it before, and had to feel my way through the dark when they asked me for help. So with those two parameters set, I began scrolling through my images and found a photo I took of Devil's Tower in Wyoming, which in itself is a pretty fantastical landscape. It was famously used in the 1977 film Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I loaded the photo of Devils Tower into Procreate, and started playing around with the chromatic aberration feature (shout out to Jádé for telling me about it!). And that set the scene for the rest of the composition.
Then, I grabbed the hands from a photo of a Mardi Gras parade - originally they were reaching for beads, but in this context, they are disembodied and represent a restraint on the geese which dominate the landscape, as a nude skateboarder does a trick on top of the tower (the skateboarder came from an image from a naked protest in Philly). I was interested in the repetitive gesture of reaching and grabbing. In this context, in relationship to the geese, the hands are full, and pushing back instead of waiting to receive.
Just for fun, and to practice cutting/pasting in Procreate, I put my placed my dog in a landscape with a bunch of aloof geese. This is his worst nightmare.
No comments:
Post a Comment