The narrative unit in Digital Media was all about the visual aspects of storytelling.
My surrealism composition was related to worldbuilding, but not our worldbuilding project in English, since that project had not been started yet. This piece was inspired by a personal story I’ve been working on for almost two years now. The magic system I developed for this project is based in hallucinations and mind games, and I even wrote a prose piece about it in a surrealist writing style. Due to this, I thought it would be the perfect subject for this assignment. I’m actually really proud of how this piece came together. The process was really fun and I learned a lot about photobashing. If I were to do it again with more time, though, I would put more effort into making a better background.
My inspiration was a short surrealist story I wrote some time ago. The story included a brief part about the character hallucinating their “eyes melting”, and I ran with that for this piece. I started with a screenshot of a 3D model I made of the character in the story. After resizing it to fit properly, I sharpened the edges manually and painted over certain parts to fix proportions and make it look natural. Next, I blocked out where I wanted the “tears” to go, and then added in the hand pictures. Then, I brought in a picture of a lock of hair and warped it to fit. The lines on the face happened kind of naturally; I was messing around with shading under the hands and it looked nice, so I pushed it to make it look more “trippy.” After that, I brought in a picture of an ear and painted over it to make it blend in, since the 3D model didn’t have a finished ear. I added more hair, added many layers of paint to add effect and fix shading, and then added two overlapping pictures of geodes as a background. Lastly, I added some texture overlays and a very subtle hint of sepia color. I made sure that all images used from online were creative commons.
Next, we worked on our other project for this unit, which was the Multi-Layer 3D Art Project. I chose a lightbox for mine, since I was excited to play with depth, and it seemed like the option where I could draw the most. I am also really proud of how this turned out. It was really hard to plan out how the light was going to filter through, and it definitely wasn’t perfect in the end, but it’s the best that I can do and I’m happy with it.
My main goal for this project was to create a strong sense of depth, and I think I achieved that. I am proud of the clarity I was able to get in the silhouettes of the people. I wish I had put more effort into detailing the middle figure, but I’m very proud of the other two, especially the woman with the boom mic in the back. I really struggled with figuring out how to make sure the light came through properly. Looking back, I would be more careful about cast shadows– some of the layers in the back cast some shadows through the upper layers that I didn’t want to be there. I also would have made more spaces for light to come through, since there is one spot where the light did not come through enough between the layers, so they sort of muddied together.