Assignment !0: Self-Directed Project: In the Kitchen - More Experiments and Finished Pieces

By morning it had snowed, so I was confronted with the need to photograph my work in the cold light of snowfall with the warm light of lightbulbs. There wasn’t enough natural light to manage without artificial light.

Daylight helped a bit, but I was still concerned that the foreground elements were being overwhelmed by the background. I couldn’t help comparing it with the cleaner backgrounds from PSExpress.

I wondered if I could find a digital solutions, and I went back to PSExpress to test more colours (photoshop was still offline). 

After numerous iterations I ended up with these, a general feeling of dissatisfaction, and a sense of time bounding along towards an ever-closer deadline.

I stopped for a break and a search for inspiration.

When I came back I decided to try a different angle and to think a bit about typography. Initially I thought I wouldn’t include any, to give the hypothetical magazine editor options to use their preferred fonts and styles. As a magazine editor myself, I always lament the time people spend on formatting their submissions as the first thing I have to do is strip everything back to body text so that I can apply the standard fonts, sizes and colours for the magazine as a whole. However, for the exercise, I decided to add a title to the spread. I tried a number of fonts and colours. Mercifully Photoshop had been resurrected while I was gone.  

I just let the words sit as an idea. Then I made a sample layout with some text boxes. I tried some coloured backgrounds out.

I still wasn’t happy with the image. I went back and looked at some earlier images.

I added in my typography.

I changed colours a few times. I was irritated by the awkward cropping and, as Photoshop was back, I remade the image.

I like the simpler version but it’s frustrating that none of the blend modes would keep the white/patterned parts of the crockery. I wanted to see the jug, for example, fully formed rather than being able to see the background through the lighter parts. For this reason I pulled back the collaged image to compare them.

I decided to take the collage into Photoshop and see if I could both add the typography and do something about the collage to make it more attractive. I found that the Party font I’d used on the digital image was too insubstantial to show up against the collage, so I selected a different font and settled on blue for the text. It may be that I have made it unnecessarily bold. I need good contrast for reading text due to my visual impairment, and I had feedback for a previous project that my text was too bold. I’ve reduced the opacity a bit to try to compensate but it’s hard for me to make a judgment and there’s no one here today to have a look. I also changed the colour balance and that really lifted the image and made me feel much happier about it.

Here is the finished image…

…and here it is in the layout.

Lastly, I compared my two final images. While I like the less cluttered nature of the digital, I feel that it doesn’t fulfil the sketchbook style requested in the brief, and also the issue with the blend mode is annoying. In the end I’m happiest with my collaged background, which now no longer overwhelms the foreground.