Progress Update 4

So I kind of changed my idea...again.

After meeting with Ed and considering the work I have made in this project, I realized I wasn't quite happy with where I was and wanted to change my direction slightly. Part of this comes from wanting to do something new and exciting. Considering my last few projects, I realized most of them had been portrait 11x17s and that most of them relied heavily on darker colors. I wanted to change that up and explore a landscape composition and to incorporate the bright but muted colors I love. I still want to maintain my original concept of online connection and the phrase "You're the reason for my smile," but I think I can do it in a much more interesting format. Lately, I have been inspired by digital collages and I think it provides an interesting direction for this image to go in.

In terms of process, I knew I didn't have much time before critique so I wanted to make something very quickly to give an idea of the direction I'm going in.

I found a black and white image of hands. I was particularly drawn to this image as hands is often used as a symbol of connection and I loved the hands depicted were of different ages. I feel it is most fitting in this time, given the number of family members (e.g. grandchildren and grandparents) who have been separated by covid and are only able to connect online. I also liked the way the hands positioning resembled The Creation of Adam, but instead of showing the separation between God and man, the hands are together and thus show the connection. I explored using one of Photoshop's neural filters called "Colorize" and was fairly happy with the color it was able to add to the image but did make some slight adjustments where the AI missed.

I also found images of devices. I decided to go with both a laptop and a phone as those are the two common ways in which people connect online, whether it. be by Zoom or through messaging. I found two images that had really interesting angels and masked them out and positioned them so the hands would be going through the screens. I did. have to extend the hands a bit which I did by using the lasso tool and the content-aware fill tool to match the skin tone and texture easily.

I haven't quite figured out the additional elements I want to add, such as the device backgrounds but I do want to incorporate some of the elements I had considered within my earlier process, like the speech bubbles and some other visual elements.