Topic #41 - Morning

Having CFS has an interesting impact on my photography - I have very few photos taken in the morning, because I simply don't get out of the house till about midday! Hunting through my folders did reveal this one, with the foliage shadows on the washing, taken in Melbourne.

I took this photo for inspiration and was thinking about making large panels of translucent porcelain to "project" shadows onto. A lot of my earlier work revolves around shadows as you can see here and here.

I spent a lot longer than I intended trying out different ideas for this piece in Photoshop - damn computers! they gobble up your time, but they do make it easy to explore a range of options. In the end I had so much trouble selecting one as my entry that I am just going to upload a number of options and whichever comes up first will be the entry! You can visit my blog to see what else

I came up with (for those reading this on Artwords).

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Cycles: an artist book - wip

I've spent hours on Photoshop today working on different options for this image. It will be the basis for one page of an artist book I plan to make for my masters. The working title for the book is Cycles and it will explore the cyclical nature of all life - continuing the theme of process/change. I'll probably do an inkjet transfer with the image or maybe incorporate it in encaustic. Those explorations are the next step. Once I decide for one page, then that will set the media for the book. I have chosen a flutter book format because I want the whole thing to be visible at once but also create a circle. There is a bit more work to do in PS - I'll be removing the powerlines, but otherwise I am reasonably happy with these two options. Let me know if you have a preference.

Just a short post today because I'm typing one-handed - the other one is supporting the head of my sleeping cat!

Self portraits update - more advice needed...

I want to thank all the people who took the time to leave comments or email me personally to give me some feedback on the self portraits I am working on. It was incredibly helpful and really helped me to fill in the gap that working off campus creates.

I have done a few more tests, and am posting a few more images here. One thing that came up was the idea of at least seeing some facial features in the portrait with clay. Rather than working just with layer opacity I decided to try splitting the face, as you can see on the left. I actually had a lot of fun playing with this in photoshop and trying to achieve some sense of 3-D. Of course, working with real clay and projections would look rather different. Again I would appreciate people's opinions on this. Already my husband has said it reminds him of Phantom of the Opera, which isn't an association I really want.



This is an attempt at simply using a figure and embedding that in wax. To me this lacks the emotional strength of the actual face. What do you think?
















In this piece I am exploring the use of the square in place of a figure. I think this speaks mostly about the materials and loses most of the sense of preservation or embalming associated with a human being in wax. I do love the way the fibres in the paper are visible - it looks like hair when held up to the light - and suggests some new directions to follow in the future.