Assignment 3: Illustrating visual space: part 2

As stated in my last post, the final part of this assignment is to choose three elements to further investigate this way of working and culminate with one image that I feel encapsulates my own understanding of the exercise.

I randomly came up with three other objects to try: a joyful woman, a ball and a pen. I had been thinking about joy in another context, so I understand where the choice of this image came from. As for the ball and pen, I’m not really sure. I decided that I should aim for a slightly more professional look, so as I looked through images I was looking for ones that would be easy to extract from their backgrounds. I ended up with images where this had already been done. 

To my surprise, in the previous exercise I enjoyed working with the black and white images. Usually I opt for colour  I also quite liked the retro cut and paste feel of the unedited images with their bits of extraneous background  However, I decided to contrast that approach with creating a more blended set of images for this part of the assignment.

First I just played with the images, investigating the relationships between them.

Then I had an idea to try to create some distance to the ‘landscape’ of the substrate by placing small black and white images in the background, then slightly bigger, partially saturated colour images in front of them, and larger, full colour images in the foreground.

I was really disappointed with how this worked in practice. It became far too busy and complex. Looking back at it, I still think the concept has merit and could be used to create a feeling of distance in a simpler form or with a different kind of image. I like the mixture of black and white and colour elements, I just don’t like this composition.I was also a bit frustrated with the blend modes. I couldn’t work out how to retain opacity in the upper layers. I know I could have worked on the images with the magic wand, but I feel like there must be a way to do this using blend modes and clipped adjustments. 

Anyway, I moved on from there to investigate how the juxtaposition of black and white with colour elements would work in a simpler image.

I really like this image.The black and white ball makes a good backdrop for the woman in colour.. It makes her stand out as more vibrant. This is the case even though I’ve blended the images, with the result that the woman picks up some of the darks and lights of the ball behind her. I like the way this looks, that she belongs in her environment. The diagonal placement suggests movement, but the slight blending suggests coherence and a bit of stability.I also like the way she’s holding the pen. It looks as though she might do something unusual with it. 

While I like this image, I didn’t feel that it says what this exercise is about. I turned my attention to trying to achieve an image that might communicate this better.

Firstly I tried a similar approach to the sideways image I liked in the first part of this assignment. It’s a nice enough image and it does show some distance via the size and placement of the women and balls. Throughout the creation of these images the pen has been out of context, and again here, I wonder what the pen is doing here  There is a somewhat disconcerting feel to the black and white pen element being placed in front of all those colourful balls. Where the black and white ball image, with other elements in colour, created a feeling of harmony, here it has an interesting wrongness about it which makes me curious about it. I don’t think it’s displeasing, just surprising. That could probably be used as a communication technique.

For my final image I decided to use what I’d learned to go back to a simpler version of my third image, using the relative size and position of the elements to create the illusion of depth.

While this is, as a whole, an image with a horizontal/vertical orientation, the slight diagonals of the women add a sense of movement within a stable environment, as if they might be jumping. Almost, the image could work without the pens, but I felt that there needed to be some suggestion of a frame to hold the space, so that, rather than marking a horizon in the image, I used the pens to mark the furthest point forward and to sketch the bare bones of a frame. The diagonal pen looks poised to write something about what is going on. I think if I had placed the women as they are, but without the different sized balls, the portrayal of depth wouldn’t have been as strong. It’s the relationship of each woman with each ball, and their sizes relative to the other women and balls, which adds that feeling of depth. 

There is definitely a change of mood between the two sets of images. The black and white ones share a sense of wistfulness, perhaps due in part to the bare branches of the tree and the run down hut, as much as because of them being black and white. Perhaps the retro look of them, with their extraneous bits of background, adds to this feeling of slight melancholic nostalgia. By contrast, the colour images are more vibrant and present in time. The subject matter, again, has a bearing; this is a joyful woman and a playful ball and a good looking pen. They’re all stripped of any background elements and often blended to mesh with one another in a way which is quite different from the slightly awkward cut and paste of the first set of images.

While this assignment  has been short and straightforward compared with the previous two, I feel that I’ve learnt quite a lot from it. It’s helped me to consider a range of different ways to place and size elements within a composition  it’s also brought out ways of working with both black and white and colour, and the way this can influence the mood of an image and the elements within it. Again, I’ve seen the value of moving towards simplicity. Also, the way that the pen doesn’t have an obvious fit like the way that the woman relates to the ball, opens up questions: should it be there at all? What does it mean? Why has it been included? The juxtaposition of elements that don’t have an obvious connection could be used in visual communication to set up a dialogue between the viewer and the image. Rather than correcting the disharmony, there is the opportunity to leave the viewer with questions.

Using Photoshop to try out different compositions is a quick and easy way to investigate options and refine ideas. It’s a way to think visually rather than the very wordy approach of the spider diagram. I like both, but the ease of moving things around in a space on Photoshop has impressed me, and would be a useful preliminary to working up sketches. Also, working in squares has been really fun and reminded me how much I like working on shapes other than the A series, which has had such a standardising effect on composition. Squares, circles and triangles are all good shapes to use. 

While none of this is really new to me, it has given me some tools to shake up the way I approach creating an image or series of images. It’s been a useful and inspiring process.