FINDING OUR WAYPROCESS
This past week I've been with family at the beach. It's been wonderful, and when I'm at the beach, I just go with the flow and let things happen as they will. This feeling of everything being alright in my world, and having faith that everything will work out is part of what this story is about. The other part is the question all of us ask regularly; what am I doing? It feels like we're all searching for something, but sometimes we don't even know what, and often the things most important are already right around us: friends, family and enjoying the simple pleasures of life.
• • •
After I wrote the story, I needed to come up with imagery that conveyed the feeling I was trying to portray. Lightness and whimsy were two key words I thought of to describe what I wanted. The process I've developed came about basically from play. I really wasn't thinking too hard but just went with the flow and didn't force it.
The images are a combination of physical and digital art. The texture is all physical. The process I discovered was to take small 3x4 sheets of paper and apply colored icing to them. After they dry, I put them over a light to achieve a backlit photo that looks like this:
I ended up creating 273 of these with many different textures, colors and light characteristics
You can see in that photo, they look flat. The key to this technique was adding the backlighting. I love stained glass art and that quality of light was partially the inspiration for this technique. I wanted to try to bring light through my work in a very real way. To actually accomplish this for so many pieces, I rigged up a little station,
After I had all the images captured digitally, I brought them into an app on the Mac called Pixelmator Pro. Fantastic app. This part is the most complex, but essentially I did a digital collage with some effects to change colors a bit and blur the forms.
Overall, I'm happy with how this project turned out and I feel the style I achieved matched my feelings well, which is my goal. I hope you enjoyed it and that this explanation of my process was informative. If you want to know more, send me an email and say [email protected]