For our Surreal Composition project, we used a variety of images to create a new work of art in Photoshop. My Surreal Composition is meant to portray the message of identity. It is something you work on all your life, and is a rightfully ever-shifting prisma. The idea of identity morphing over time is one that I have become a lot more comfortable with within the last year, and I have been forced to accept that I may never be exactly me in the way I want to be.
When creating this work, I used a combination of pictures and painting directly onto the canvas. Since parts of my composition are monotone and others are more colorful, adjustment layer clipping masks became my best friend. I also used a ton of clipping masks to erase parts of certain pictures without editing the original image. Some parts of the photo, such as the threads and the parts of the hand getting ‘poked,’ were painted on by hand to create the illusion that the pictures were actually a part of one another.
I definitely enjoyed both the Surreal and Realistic Composition projects for different reasons. I feel that I had more room to be creative with the former and try to really show my own personal style, but the latter was a cool challenge because I tried my best to trick people into thinking the photos I created were real.
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