Unjustified Regret: A Junior Experimental Project by Kevin Chan (2013)

My piece Unjustified Regret is based off of ‘the feeling of confusion and frustration due to the passage of time’. My piece reflects the regret I feel after something is completed or finished, like a school year, a project, a vacation, etc... Whenever this happens, I feel like there are holes in my life of things I should have done differently, which are represented by the ghost-like figures in the image. Behind these silhouettes are the words ''The Story Continues'', which is a reminder to myself that my future can be independent of my past, something I often forget. The entire image’s color has been inverted, with the green leaves of the tree now pink. This is a way of expressing how I frequently ‘invert’ my feelings of a situation, and let negative feelings overcome the positive ones.

In order to create Unjustified Regret, I started by taking photographs late at night. Using a twenty-second exposure, I captured myself in three separate locations in the image. The moonlight provided a small amount of lighting for the background, while a lone flashlight lit up the foreground. Then, in Photoshop, I changed the hue of the image until the colors were inverted. Next, I outlined the two images of ghosts on the lawn and cut them out onto a new layer. Using layer effects, I created an outer stroke as well as an outer glow. Next, I used the smudge tool to create ghostly effects around the outlines. Finally, I added extruded text saying ''The Story Continues'' to help convey my message.