Freestyle Academy proudly presents

Distant Worlds: A Junior Experimental Project by Cindy Nguyen (2013)

I am exploring the sense of curiosity that I experience when I see a reality that isn’t necessarily what I want to see. Every day, daydreams occur to me and I start to form what-ifs in my head and transport myself into a fantasy land. There will be times when everything just simply isn’t going the way I expected it to and there needs to be some escape. Those are the thoughts that inspired my composition. The photograph is the ‘reality’ that I see. My daydreams, thoughts, and curiosity consolidate into the sketches drawn onto the torn fragments of lined paper. They show an alternate universe comprised of my own imaginings.

My composition is what would be considered mixed media. I shot the photo in my local downtown area, attempting to find an area that had a relatively scenic view that was bustling, but not to the point where a stranger walking by would be overwhelmed. I took my own binder paper I normally use for school and scanned it into my computer. Once it was uploaded, I used Photoshop to digitally tear the paper apart and add in textures and effects to imitate that of torn paper in real life. I placed the pieces of paper rather spread throughout the photo, but made sure to not cover the woman sitting on the bench, looking rather contemplative, unaltered. This would be so it would be left up to the audience to believe whether it is her own imagination, or my own and she happened to be there. Using a regular Photoshop brush with slight tweaks to make the lines weighted and marker-like, I ‘doodled’ what I would have liked to see in a comical and cartoon-esque sense. I also left the doodles uncolored, to contrast with the fully-colored photograph to give the audience the feel of a fantastical, out-of-reach land.
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