October Octoparty: A Senior Surreal Photo by Isabel Martynenko (2017)

After studying our assigned surreal artist, we were told to create our own surrealist piece inspired from a daydream thought. I used my camera to play around with different lenses and ended up using the macro lens for this project. I went out to a Japanese market to buy an octopus and took detailed pictures of the tentacles at home. We were supposed to incorporate an animal into this assignment so I decided to go with an extraordinary creature. I, of course, took pictures of a lot of other things like the disco ball and sand in my piece. After finishing up with the photographs, I would play around with different filters and effects in Photoshop to make this piece have a surreal feeling to it. I was aiming to make this piece look like an alien planet with tentacles for trees, a disco ball for its moon, pink sand for its deserts, and water patterns for its skies. Even though I stuck with the theme of an aquatic environment, I decided to make the setting a desert to contrast the idea of this alien planet being underwater.

I incorporated some artistic elements and techniques into this project that I believed to work well together. For color choice, I did two contrasting colors like the bright pink for the land and dark blue for the sky. That really brought out the horizon line in this piece. I also put in different textures into this piece to bring out the sliminess to the tentacles and the rough, dryness to the sandy desert in the background. I also decided to add some fog to add some atmosphere to the planet’s surface. For the depth perception, I put the octopus mountain in the foreground while the desert and sky are in the background so this made it seem like things were up close and far away. Some of the octopus trees even go behind the horizon line to show that the planet’s surface continues beyond that point. There is a lot of contrast to this piece but it somehow still tends to tie together well as one piece.