Exposed: A Senior Surreal Photo by Julianne Wilson (2016)

My surrealist art tells the story of a boy who has a lot on his mind, so he writes everything he sees and feels in his notebook. He's constantly struggling between positive and negative thoughts as the pen bleeds onto the pages, exposing him in a way that's hidden to everyone else.

For our surrealism project, we were required to learn how to take HDR photos and incorporate that into our piece. For my surrealist piece, I chose to portray how people expose themselves through their words whether in a diary, journal, or spoken. My HDR element was my friend Sebastian Marulanda's hands set on top of his notebook. I then made that photo black and white in order to highlight the more important parts of the piece. I used paint and water colors to create the blood drips that I then added to the pages of the notebook, expressing how people pour their hearts into their words, and are often exposing themselves in a very vulnerable way. Finally, I used Adobe Illustrator to create the text images, putting strong, meaningful words into his hands in a swirling pattern, making it seem as if they are swirling around in his mind. I chose to make the words red as well to go along with the theme of being exposed and vulnerable. For this project, the entire piece was shot in Camera RAW and put together in Adobe Photoshop.