Unit 2 - Surreal Photoshop | artist-portfolio

Unit 2 - Surreal Photoshop

A mother's love for her child is like nothing else in the world. It knows no law, no pity, it dares all things and crushes down remorselessly all that stands in its path.

- Agatha Christie

For My Daughter

Digital Photography

150cm x 100cm

October 2015

For My Daughter is a digital art piece, inspired by the artist Brooke Shaden, that honors mothers around the world who do everything they can for their children. The piece features my mother transforming into falcon wings, a symbol of the strong, fast and powerful woman that she is, flying over the desert, a far off place as compared to the city we live in. No matter than she is losing feathers as a sign of stress and responsibilities, she is still determined to do what she can for her kids.

For this piece, I followed through my plans from start to finish. I had brainstormed ideas with my mom as a subject as well as exploring different ways I could position her using the space that I had. I ended up choosing the one of her transforming into a falcon as I have seen human transforming into multiple forms in other surrealism photography pieces before, as well as having them floating in the space like in Brooke Shaden’s contemporary photographs. I had taken several photos from the internet which were marked as anyone being able to use and modify them, especially for the landscape images and the falcon images, along with a photograph that I took of my mom and combined them together. Using Photoshop, I combined my uses of image mask as well as the puppet warp tool in order to position the images as naturally as possible. After I had the combination that I wanted in terms of alignment and size, I had to adjust the colours (tones and saturations) in order to blend the image together the best I can in order to make it appear like it was originally one photo. For that, I used the Curves tool as well as the Gradient Map tool to slightly adjust the colour to the undertones that I wanted all my colours to have and at the end. I wanted to have an undertone of cool colours which I thought was a trend in surrealist photography. I also adding a faded vignette to complete my piece, which is something that I have seen other surrealist photographers use in their pieces, and which I thought would nicely wrap up my piece.