Trying New Things – Conceptual Art

I have been watching Framed this week and got inspired by Brooke Shaden to create a piece of conceptual art starting with a selfie. By the time I decided to give it a try it was already 4pm here in Washington state. The sun sets right now at around 4:20pm so I knew I didn’t have much time. I grabbed my Canon camera, a mini Christmas tree and an empty jar and drove away. The Columbia river is not far from my house so I drove to Willow Grove boat launch and quickly made my way to the beach. The weather was in the 30’s or early 40’s today so I kept my coat on and didn’t plan on changing into a cool pretty dress. Not one car or person was in sight so that was nice to not have to worry about people watching me do crazy things. hahahhaha.

I put the jar in the sand and took several different photos of it at different angles.

Once I was happy with the results I moved on to try to get the perfect selfie. Like Brooke Shaden I wanted to not show my face so I held the mini Christmas tree in front of my face and took several photos of myself trying to get my hair to fly from side to side.

It was so very cold out there…I decided to jump in my car and warm up so I could see the images and decide if I got the shots I needed.

After warming up I decided to try sitting down and tossing my hair around. The light outside was quickly fading and then of coarse a little truck pulled up into my view. Trying to be quick I took a few more shots to save myself the embarrassment and headed home. Here are a few I took but decided not to use.

By the time I got home I was all nice and warm again thanks to a great heater and heated seats. I went straight to my macbook and started uploading my new images.

My New Photo Editing Program – Affinity Photo

Just last week I finally decided to purchase Affinity Photo. It is a software program like Adobe Photoshop but only costs $49.99. It is available on Mac, PC and IOS. There is no monthly charge and updates are free forever. I had the Beta version when they were working on it years ago so I knew I loved it already. They have a designer edition and are working on a publishing program as well. Check it out for yourself!

Putting Together a Composite is a Time Consuming Task

I probably spent 3 hours working on this photo composite until I was happy to call it done. Part of the time spent was trying to figure out where all the different features are and how to use them. I never messed around with Photoshop much except for an occasional head swap, photo collage, designing simple cards and making over the top edits on photos. It sounds like a lot but it wasn’t I promise.

Working with my two photos I got rid of my selfie background and shrunk myself down to fit in the jar. It looked really obvious that I was a cut out so I blur the outside lines a little so they were no longer sharp. I also burned and dodged the shadows and highlights to better suit the lighting. I had to flip the image horizontal because I needed to match the lighting of the jar in the sand. I found a free snow overlay online and put snow in the jar and over me. I wish I knew how to make it look like there was snow piling up on the tree and me and the sand but I do not have the experience in the program yet. I will be watching tutorials so I can gain more understanding and do more things with it.

Here is my final image I named, “Christmas on the Beach.”

Zoomed in and cropped.

So tell me what you think about my fun composite art.

Have you ever created something of this sort?

If you liked this post feel free to comment, share or give it a thumbs up. 

Thank you and see you soon!

 

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