Blog 5

1) I think my most significant accomplishment was in my final project. I successfully captured the pictures I needed after a couple trial and errors. I ran into a couple of problems with blurriness but was able to overcome that. For me, I was quite proud of the way I used the burn tool on my second picture (the one with the black eye), I feel like I made it very convincing. I feel like my big idea and theme was well developed, more than that of the midterm. I gave my final more attention because the pictures came from me and each of them reflects a part of my life. I also feel that it could be meaningful to someone else who knows a person in this situation or is actually in an abusive relationship themselves.
My finals can be viewed below.

2) This project came from my midterm. The most challenging part for me was trying to blend the pictures together and make them seamless. I had a difficult time using masks in this picture, I was still new to them and had to work hard to make my selections. For awhile I did not know that the selection was made first before you applied that mask, so once I figured that out I was a master a masks. I also grew fond of the artistic tools. It takes awhile to choose the right one that works with your picture, but once you find it, it makes a great improvement.

3) I'd like to compart my final projects compared to my midterms. In both sets, my big idea was emotion. For my midterm my theme was evolution of love, how love grows and changes over time. The pictures used came from the internet. I feel that I did get my meaning across and portrayed what I was trying to. My final project theme was relationships. For these, I used my own pictures. I think that this was the stronger of my two projects because it directly related to me.

Final Projects

Final Artist Statement

  My big idea was emotion.  I looked at how emotion played a part in a relationship, specifically anger. In both my pictures, the eye plays a big part. The eye is the most important and useful tool to seeing and depicting the world around us. There are always two sides to every story and I wanted to emphasize that with my pictures. The first picture is the eye of a bystander, someone who sees the relationship as healthy and happy. This eye has the tendency to see things more denotatively. It sees a happy couple smiling and doesn’t see that there are internal problems.  The second eye is the eye in the relationship. This eye sees the truth about the relationship, which is not happiness, its anger. I see this eye as seeing things more connotatively. Once they see their partner angry, they begin thinking about the reasons behind it. Like, “what did I do this time to make him mad” or”why is he hitting me,” questions that would only be asked if you knew the truth about the relationship.  Both of my pictures are not realistic, they have a kind of overlay to them.  This overlay I see as being a blind spot. For the first picture, the person is blind to the actual situation going on, they see the happy couple but they do not see the abuse behind it. The second picture I see the eye as being immature and self-denying. Even though they are getting abused they stay in the relationship. They put up this binder and take the fault for the actions. They see it as their fault and think that they are doing something wrong, but in reality, it is not their fault at all. I get this inspiration from someone I knew who was in an abusive relationship. They seemed to be a happy couple on the outside, but there were internal problems.  She would always claim it’s her fault he hit her. She was blind to the actual truth.