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Inspirations:
The inspiration for this piece was The Happy Donor by Rene Magritte. Rene Magritte was a Belgian surrealist artist who is well known for painting. Many of his works use familiar items into unusual contexts to give them new meaning. In this way he would also invoke a sense of mystery. The Happy donor was made in Magritte’s one of his later works close to his death in 1967. The happy Donor is a simple portrait of the silhouette of a man with a bowler hat. Inside the silhouette there is a painting of a home with woods surrounding it. The silhouette is on a brown wall. There are different interpretations on what this painting means, whether he symbolizes what is inside people.
My other inspiration is Persistence of Memory by Salvador Dali. Salvador Dali was a Spanish surrealist artist with one of his most famous paintings being his surrealist piece Persistence of memory. In this painting hard objects like the watch are limp. Near the middle is a creature that is limp. The creature has large eyelashes and seems to have a tongue sticking out. One last key part is a clock being eaten by ants in the left corner of the piece.
Surrealism is a cultural movement that aims to assert the power of the unconscious and dreams. Both Magritte's and Dali's works shaped the the surrealist movements. In both painting the artist intention is to question reality.
Surrealism is a cultural movement that aims to assert the power of the unconscious and dreams. Both Magritte's and Dali's works shaped the the surrealist movements. In both painting the artist intention is to question reality.
Planning:
In this piece I had trouble finding inspiration and had trouble understanding what to do for my project. On one hand I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do but at the same time I had to start somewhere so I started putting down my ideas.
In this page I mostly wrote down my ideas for the project and figuring out what I wanted to do. At the top you can see were I tried writing some of my beliefs. One of my ideas early on was including clocks into the piece. My first idea and one I stuck with was what I imagined as calm and peace when I had gone to karate even though we trained and went there I remember the feeling of peace along with. One specific memory is going to karate on Saturday morning in the summer and they would open the windows and it would be early calm. I also wanted to emphasize in my photo that this feels like a long time ago. Early on I had the ideas to use clock symbolize the time passed as it been maybe five or six year. I was also looking for inspiration and originally my inspiration was a painting called The Fossil of Don Quixote by Jose Roosevelt another surrealist artist and a. I was surprised to learn the Don Quixote is a famous novel but besides that I couldn't find a lot of information about the painting. So That's when I started researching other surrealist artists and found Rene Magritte and Salvador Dali artist that inspired Jose Roosevelt.
Here is where I started sketching some of my ideas to get a better understanding of what I wanted to make. One of my first ideas was to have a landscape and place a desk. Since right now its autumn I thought of incorporating the changing leaves in the college. I wanted to take advantage of the season since Autumn can symbolize change which did match with my ideas. In a few of the sketches its hard to tell but I drew a playground. My idea here was to try to symbolise childish or youth because most of the what happened when I was a much younger and was still kinda a child. In some of these sketches I also included distorted or melting clocks.
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The section on the top right part of the image was made around the same time as the sketches on the other page. The rest of the page was made during the process. Most of this page was made while I was going through my process as I wrote down my thoughts about is writing Photopea and Photoshop. There a few sketches of what I did in Photoshop.
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Process:
To first start off I tried messing with my phone camera trying to take the highest resolution possible. I took a few pictures of a park near my home but when I imported those photos into Photopea I wasn’t happy with the resolution. That is when I contacted my cousin who had a phone that could take clearer photos. So that Saturday me, my brother, and my cousin spent an afternoon helping me take pictures for this piece. Then we needed to figure out how to transfer the photos from their phone to my phone. We did find a solution. I opened my google drive in their phone and we uploaded the photos directly from their phone to my google drive where I could access them.
After this I started working in Photopea. Here is where I ran into an obstacle: Photopea would not open photos. The program did not accept the file format of the image. It took a while to figure it out but Photopea accepts PDF and in google drive you can convert an image into a PDF. After I figured that out, I changed the images into PDF format and opened them up in Photopea. I made the 24x36 blank canvas and on the right you can see the first image where I used the crop and refine edge tool to crop myself out. After this I added my second image of a waterfall behind it. This was to resemble my inspiration The happy donor by Rene Magritte. Photopea crashed on me at this point and I didn’t know how to save at the time so I ended up losing all my progress. After this I decided to just do the entire project in Photoshop on the laptops at school since they could handle the images better than Photopea on my laptop. I did the same thing as before but I used different images. Looking back I wasn’t happy with the appearance of the first attempt which is why I chose different images. I also liked the pose in the new image I chose since there was more action and the pose was more interesting. I did not know how to take a screenshot on the laptop in the art room at this point so I don’t have photos of me assembling but I essentially did the same thing steps as in Photopea. |
Here is a jump at this point I had added a filter over the image giving it a yellow tone to make the image warm overall. I wanted to make the image feel a bit more cheery in a sense. This was also the first attempt at making a melting clock. The image is of a clock I found in the store and thought it would look better. I first used the select tool to select the clock from the original image. Then I mess around with the refine tool. When refining the image I found using contrast a lot with feather worked well. So then I copied the image and opened it in the canvas where I was putting all the images. I used the puppet transform tool but while using that tool I realized a few things first: it was hard to change the proportion of the clock and I would get jagged edges on the edge of the clock when using puppet transform. I continued trying to get the try to use the puppet transform tool but it wasn't giving me the effect I wanted so I went and looked at the other transform tool and found two that worked. First using the distort tool that allows you to change the perspective of the image. This made the clocks look as they were laying down on the ground. Next I used the warp tool to make the clocks look ways and less solid. I did this for all the clocks expect for the largest clock. That clock I did with the puppet transform and later used distort. Though now taking a closer look it seem that the edges were still jagged and I should have gone back to redo that clock.
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The last thing I did with this image was figuring out how to make the image into a file I could place in on this website since weebly doesn't allow images over the size of 10m and my Photoshop file also with the metadata was 7x that size so I went to the web to look for a solution and I found out that Photoshop has a option called save to web were you can change the file format and size so I changed it to be as close to 10 m as possible and then posted it.
Experimental:
There were quite a lot of images taken that weren't used in the final image. The reason why there were so many pictures taken is because I wasn't sure exactly how I wanted the final product to turn out so a lot of different pictures were taken so there would be a variety of photos to choose from. These are only a small fraction of images taken that weren't used.
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In Adobe Photoshop I also also experimented with the filter on the images. There were filter that increased contrasted , black and white, one that added tint and few more. I messes around with some of these filter in photoshop. I did use a few filter on the final image like the contrast filter to make the color stand out a bit more thought I mostly kept the color similar to the original images for the final product. Though looking back I could has used some to add more contrast or to add unity to the piece.
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Critique:
Similarities:
-All the pieces use the color of brown and blue.
-All take inspiration from the Surrealism movement
-All the pieces use the color of brown and blue.
-All take inspiration from the Surrealism movement
Contrast:
-The color in my collage there are more vibrant colors in the background .This is because with the digital image I was able to manipulate the colors using filter to make them brighter or darker. This is why the leaves in the background pop out.
- The background for both The Persistence of Memory and The happy donor have more space between the object in there photos. My digital collage there are leaves everywhere in the background and foreground leaving very little empty space.
-Different media: The piece I made was made using photoshop and the other two are painting on physical canvases
-The color in my collage there are more vibrant colors in the background .This is because with the digital image I was able to manipulate the colors using filter to make them brighter or darker. This is why the leaves in the background pop out.
- The background for both The Persistence of Memory and The happy donor have more space between the object in there photos. My digital collage there are leaves everywhere in the background and foreground leaving very little empty space.
-Different media: The piece I made was made using photoshop and the other two are painting on physical canvases
Reflection:
My thoughts are that I created something decent but I did not particularly like how the final product ended up looking. One of the reasons is that I think the image doesn’t have good unity and the area where the feet of the silhouette and background meet is cluttered and blends together even though that wasn’t the intention. The clocks are solid, non-organic shapes that do provide contrast. For my project, I explored surrealism and my inspiration for this project were two paintings, The Happy Donor by Rene Magritte and The Persistence of Memory by Salvador Dali. For this project, I took different aspects of the painting and applied them to my work. For example in The Happy Donor, I took the concept of looking inside the silhouette of a person. The biggest challenge I found while working on this project was moving files into Photoshop and out of Photoshop along with making the clock. My favorite part was cropping and transforming the images on photoshop since it was fun to explore the different tools. To conclude I am indifferent to this work and I hope others when they view this work will question the thought behind this piece.
Connection to the ACT:
Clearly explain how you are able to identify the cause effect relationship between your inspiration and its effect on your artwork?
--When making this piece I was inspired by and incorporated some of the use they symbolism in the work for example the melting clock in The Persistence of Memory or the silhouette in The Happy Donor. This in turn affected the direction I look in my artwork.
What is the overall approach the author has regarding the topic of your inspiration?
--That there were different interpretation to the symbolism of the piece and that these artist were important in shaping the surrealist movement.
What kind of generalizations and conclusions have you discovered about people, ideas, culture, etc. while you researched your inspiration?
--The Surrealism and art in general can be made intentionally vague and up to interpretation to effect your feeling and can convey a message or feeling.
What is the central idea or theme around your inspirational research?.
--The central idea of theme of my inspiration is the consciousness and change along with patience.
What kind of inferences did you make while reading your research?
--That the different use of familiar objects and using them in different context can invoke different feeling of mystery and confusions in artwork.
--When making this piece I was inspired by and incorporated some of the use they symbolism in the work for example the melting clock in The Persistence of Memory or the silhouette in The Happy Donor. This in turn affected the direction I look in my artwork.
What is the overall approach the author has regarding the topic of your inspiration?
--That there were different interpretation to the symbolism of the piece and that these artist were important in shaping the surrealist movement.
What kind of generalizations and conclusions have you discovered about people, ideas, culture, etc. while you researched your inspiration?
--The Surrealism and art in general can be made intentionally vague and up to interpretation to effect your feeling and can convey a message or feeling.
What is the central idea or theme around your inspirational research?.
--The central idea of theme of my inspiration is the consciousness and change along with patience.
What kind of inferences did you make while reading your research?
--That the different use of familiar objects and using them in different context can invoke different feeling of mystery and confusions in artwork.
Citations:
-Dali Salvador. The Persistence of Memory. 1931, The Museum of Modern Art, New York City
-Magritte Rene, The Happy Donor. 1966,Museum of Ixelles, Belgium.
-Salvador Dalí. the persistence of memory. 1931: Moma. The Museum of Modern Art. (n.d.). Retrieved November 8, 2021, from https://www.moma.org/collection/works/79018
-Magritte Rene, The Happy Donor. 1966,Museum of Ixelles, Belgium.
-Salvador Dalí. the persistence of memory. 1931: Moma. The Museum of Modern Art. (n.d.). Retrieved November 8, 2021, from https://www.moma.org/collection/works/79018
Essay:
To me this feels like a long time ago but when I was younger like in K4, I was a very hyperactive child. I would not listen or follow directions. For example when the teacher would ask a question I would blurt out the answer or if a teacher would give the class directly for example cleaning up I would just continue what I was doing. I also didn’t take school seriously at all and treated everything at school like it was fun and games. I got in constant trouble at school for disruptive behavior. My behavior did get particularly bad in first grade. This continued on through most of school life up till about fourth grade. I remember my dad taking me to a building near the school I attended at the time. We entered the building and we went upstairs. I was confused because my dad did not tell me a lot about why we were there. We walked into a room that was very long and there I saw kids practicing punching and kicking the air. There were seats in the back and we sat there and watched. I was interested and by the end my dad asked me if I wanted to join. I said yes mostly because I was curious and interested. That's how I started my karate lessons for the next few years. There at karate we practiced the basics, we meditated, and I would still get in trouble at lessons but it was fun. Around this time my behavior also improved at school. I was no longer getting in trouble for disruptive behavior. Going through karate had mellowed me out. I also learned to listen.