Experimentation For Final Outcome.

Here I decided to muddle up the simple portraits I had taken (with intention to reticulate) and combined them with portraits with the same compositional distance as a contrast between male and female, fashionable and casual. The shattered idea was inspired from the shattered glass photoshop tutorial I previously did. Also, as an alternative to reticulation my teacher suggested I cut up my actual negatives and re arrange them with other photographs, I knew this wouldn't work because of the various exposure times used on each individual photograph, the pieces of one negative could be very contrasted and perfectly printed, and the other pieces rather dull and under exposed, so instead I did this practically with existing prints by cutting them whilst they were stuck back to back with blu tac and laying the pieces down in place removing the top photograph in specific places to reveal the other photograph underneath. I had this in mind as a final piece if it had worked so I porduced these on larger paper than all of my other experiments which are 7x9 inches and did these 7x11 inches, here are my experimentations -

This one worked very well because of how well the photographs fitted together, I should have included more parts of the male photograph to allow the mixed idea to come through more.

This second attempt worked very well too, I liked this idea very much, I think it is the compositional choice of photographs that make it work so well, also the emphasis on the fantasy styled fashion in this photograph and a similar emphasis on the casual clothing.

I felt that the pieces on this one were slightly too large and took away the effect of the shattering because they looked too soft and large rather than small and snappy, allowing them to mix more. I like the view of both models hair here but feel the composition of the casual photograph may be too large to be able to match up to the Alice photograph.

To make these pieces more interesting I thought that I could sew the pieces together and see if this would work. I liked the way it looked when I started but it was very complicated to sew the pieces when they weren't originally attached to eachother, I didn't like the effect enough to do the rest of it so I rethought my ideas and began to experiment on something else.

A close up of the stitching, it looks better close up because I feel that the larger sized pieces above took away the impact of the threading, or perhaps it was too thin to be seen and didn't have much of an impact on my work.

Before I moved on I decided to paint on the mouths of these compositions (inspired by my previous work on Wonders) to see if this made an impact on it at all, Instead it looked too small to notice in detail and rather messy where it was cut, I didn't like how random and irrelevant it looked. These pieces worked better being stuck onto black card rather than white to emphasise the shatters.

Here is a test strip of the photograph I wanted to use to create more Khan inspired blurs on the 7x10 inched larger scale. I did it in sets of 3 seconds, F16, filter 5, the highest exposure was 15 and still underexposed so I chose to go by 20 seconds.

I split the exposure time into 3 (roughly 7 seconds each blur) and tried to create blurs that were similar to what I did before but this time going off of the page. I wanted to see if I could use another sheet of paper to create the rest of the photograph that was missing in these blurs onto this.

Using a timing of 26 seconds (9 seconds each blur), F16 and filter 5 I wanted to do the same with this photograph to see which one worked best.

On this sheet I used the same timings for each blur as the first attempt and tried to produce the other side of the composition to match up to that first attempt, where I had to cover up half of the paper to produce the blur on the right, the inaccuracy of this caused an unexposed line down the middle of this. I tried to do this more accurately another 4 times (in my stekchbook) but the line was either under exposed and white or over exposed and black which didn't look technically good to be used as a final outcome so I thought of another idea instead.

Using an existing print I experimented with paint splatters inspired by Pollock. I chose orange because it contrasted the black and whit eof the photograph and was an original colour in this costume. I felt that it wasn't noticed enough and wanted something more dark and less transparent.

I chose to try red and do it on this composition because of the original colour of the Queen of Hearts character is red, I liked the combination of splatters and blurs but wanted to peronalise this and enhanc eit even more.

 I decided to collage a texture and try to print my blurred photographs onto it, I chose neutral colours of tissue paper, card and coloured paper so that my photographs didn't look too over powered, I thought that the texture would be the most interesting part of this piece and this wouldn't work because the thick texture of the collage wouldn't fit through the pritner to allow me to scan my blurred photograph onto it. Above is the one successful piece that did go through the printer (the collage had to be cut into 4s because I used 4 sheets of 7x9 inched paper for my one photograph so that it was overall A2 in size, much bigger than what I would normally go for and relating to the size of Khan's blurred photographs). I decided to put hand prints of paint onto my photographs too, this and the collaging idea was a personal add to the inspired blurs and splatters, I thought it would work well and fit with the theme of the project over all.

I scanned my collage onto paper and  printed my blurred photograph onto this instead to see what it would have looked like as a whole composition. I felt that the neutral was too dull and that brighter colours wouldn't be overbearing so I wanted to try this out next. All four parts of the photograph were blurred 4 times for this composition, I thought that this was too many and made the subject matter slightly unclear so I decided to produce another 4 sheey composition and this time use 3 blurs. I also then decided to leave half of the photograph unblurred to allow stills and detail of the fashion to come through so I could still clearly show off my theme.

Here I produced my collage by cutting up the actual prints, also scanning parts of them onto tracing paper and coloured card to see what worked best, I used these blurs combined with my collaging and added splatters and hand prints, I was very pleased with this outcome and wanted to make a series of 3 for my final piece, I felt that one would be too empty and it needed more to it. The colours represent the vibranc eof the costumes, I knew that when creating the other 2 pieces for the final (I used this one because I liked it so much) I would have to keep the colours the same and follow the same pattern of thems o that it didn't become too random and confusing.