Photo Challenge # 7

So, one of the photography challenges prompts I took on this week was taking my works beyond the traditional digital format and a bit beyond the print format as well. I will be totally honest, the challenges assigned to me this week this challenge, and the challenge I will be writing about in my next post, were a bit difficult for me. But I guess that is why they are called what they are. A "challenge".

Truthfully, I do not consider myself a creative person which is a bit ironic considering my choice of major. I work better under strict guidelines that tell me exactly what I am supposed to do. But as an artist you can’t always work like that which was what made this challenge so difficult for me. It was definitely a learning experience for me and now I know the kind of approach I want to have should I ever decide to do something like this again.

First of all, it took a long time for me to figure out what exactly I wanted to do with these pictures. Then I remembered the work of an artist of someone I follow on Instagram, her name is Tahlia Stanton and her paintings are absolutely gorgeous if you want to check them out. I thought, “Oh hey! I could try to do something like that but with actual photographs”. So, I went out, got the pictures, I was feeling really good about them. Then it came to actually painting them and I didn’t have much of an idea of what I wanted to do with them. But I remembered something that I believe Tahlia posted on her story that she kind of just goes with whatever her hand decides to do and has fun with it and as a result I went with that approach. Lets just say that my poor brain that relies entirely on planning and structure didn’t know when to tell my hands to stop and I just ended up with a nasty mess of colors that didn’t even really look good together. I don’t know what I was thinking.

So I went at the second on with a little more of a plan. I knew I wanted it to be much more simplistic than that awful thing I had created before and I knew I wanted there to be stars and blue. And I ended up with a piece that was okay, much better than the first but still not great. I ended up liking my third piece much more than the other two. I really like pastels and painting clouds so that’s what I did and I think it turned out alright.

Moral of the story, I think I just need to stick to my more structured way of doing things for future projects. And I don’t think that this will necessarily be something I do again with my usual work, but it was an interesting experience, and I did get some nice portrait photography out of it, so I am happy with that.

Just a little disclaimer, I didn’t have any good paper to print my images on for this project and I didn’t think that the paint would stick very well to photo paper either, so I went with cardstock. It worked okay for the second two that I did but please excuse the green one. He’s just all water warped and ugly but I still appreciate the lessons he taught me.

Test #3

Test #2

Test #1