Digital Painting

I don't get life sometimes. Like everything's going great and fine and dandy and then finals week comes along. Not only are there finals but there's social life issues....not necessarily bad issues...just stuff that feels more important than school. And I don't wanna lost that either. And then once things start going good there...something else comes up that you used to be waiting for so you feel like you should take advantage of it...but it doesn't seem as important anymore. And then you have your BFA portfolio waiting to be picked up because you're art teachers already reviewed it and are deciding you're fate. And by the time you get home you're roommates are asleep so you just have to stay up until 2am trying to figure everything out on your own.

Thanks for listening to me rant and rave for a second there. Now here's what I really wanted to blog about

For anyone who's taken photo classes or anything, you know how much of a joke filters in photoshop can be. They look cheesy and never really give you the feel you want. But if you can blend them well and figure out how to work then together you can get some really cool images that look digitally painted. Here are a couple pictures that I worked on this morning. The feet one took like an hour and the metal one took about two hours. You might not be able to see them very well here, but if you can click on them and expand them you can see how they look digitally painted.

Photo Illustration

This past week in my digital photo class we've learned a lot about photo illustration. The photo above is by Jerry Uelsmann. He has hundreds and hundreds of pictures that he likes to arrange in cool ways. Everything he does is created in the dark room. He must have amazing burning and dodging skills. All his images are very dreamlike and sometimes creepy (be careful when you look him up...there are some scary images...I warned you).

What I love about his work is that there is no concept whatsoever. I think that sometimes people get to caught up trying to explain what a piece of artwork means that they miss how beautiful the piece really is. It's very rare that any of my pieces have hidden meanings or back stories. They are usually just an idea that I've had rolling around in my head that finally came out on a page or in a print.

Here is my most recent print. I've had the idea of people standing on books for awhile now...don't ask me why...it's just an image I've had in my head. So I went through all my pictures and looked for images of people standing in cool positions. As soon as I saw this picture of Samuel and Dana that I took out at Sea Ranch I knew I had to use it. Then I photographed a stack of books, trying to mimic the lighting that was on the kids...I wasn't very succesfull at that, but whatever. I originally planned on making the covers of the books look like puddles of water...but that didn't really work so I just extracted the riverbed along with the two kids and placed it on top of the books. The next thing to do was choose an environment to place it all in. Looking through my pictures I found all these images of clouds that I took last semester...so I figured: why not have them floating through the skies? But seriously, wouldn't that be so fun? Floating around on giant books is my new dream. Anyways, after everything was finally put together I decided to take all the color out so it wouldn't be so distracting. It took me 5+ hours to do...but I had so much fun! This is for sure my favorite print I've done. Let me know what you think!

Raymundo

Hola

Soooo, I've been getting some complaints since I haven't posted a blog/called my family in awhile. But don't worry, I'm not frozen in a gutter somewhere like some people thought :) Be excited because I plan on posting some of my work for this semester in the next couple of days! While you're waiting...watch this awesome video:


Raymundo