Experimenting in Photoshop
After finding out about how Chris Finley distorts images and uses though as reference points for his art I thought I would do the same. However I would be distorting portraits as he did- I would use blocks of colour as my starting point.
So I made a digital ‘canvas’ and filled half orange and half red- my thinking being if I needed more colour I can always add it.
I then began using Photoshop to distort it every way I could and come up with some interesting effects.
I don’t think that I’ll use one particular photo to paint from, as I don’t think any of them work as an overall piece. What I will do however is cherry pick parts from the ones that i think work and then add them to various paintings. For example in Exercise 4 I’ll like how, at the bottom left of the image, the paint looks as if it is melting off the canvas and gives a discerning perspective which I think is exacerbated by one of the lines being so dark and the other two so light.
The only thing i would lie to pint out is the limitions of photoshop (or limitations of my ability to use it.) I fould it impossible to create some of the shapes/ manipulations i was hoping to. I wanted to ajust the persepctive of shapes and attept to sculpt the enviroment using different shapes lines and paterns that hd been manipulated. However i had trouble doing any of hat on photoshop.
My intesion is to take the same starting image and manipulate it using adobe Illustrator- a program i think that wil let me achive those effects.
Artist Research- Chris Finley
Chris Finley is an American artist who is interested in audience participation and interpretation. In his “Power Sources” series, from which these three paintings belong, Chris Finley explores the relationship people in the media spotlight have with the rest of the population.
“People in power daily affect out lives and fortunes, and more recently our misfortunes, but their distance is parallel in a sense to their ‘reach’. The fact that Finley’s abstract paintings these figures have completely disappeared relates to their absence/presence in our lives, to their visibility and invisibility”.
What interested me most about Finley’s works was how much his paintings seemed to explore space. His use of elliptical lines and patterns create a sense od depth and perspective looking as is it could be sculpture.
I was intrigued to learn that Finley also used photo references for his work. “…Finley searches for and chooses images from the Internet and then subjects them to various alterations. The images are turned, stretched and distorted, rendered completely alien from their original sources”.
This made me think about if I should use a photo as reference and manipulate it through Photoshop?
Up until now I have made a conscious effort not to reference anything but to work entirely from my mind. But as weird as it may sound that approach to working is quite limited. I think by working from an image (a manipulated one) the only thing that will change is the way that I experiment with colour and space. Instead of experimenting directly onto a canvas with paint I will be experimenting with the tools in Photoshop.
I think at the very least I will try, because when looking at colour and space, variety is always a good thing.
My Latest painting: The first Stages
In my latest painting I have been really conscious over the composition. This is my largest painting of this kind to date and I didn’t want it to end up my other largish paintings- over crowded with patterns, disorganised and no central focus.
With this painting therefore I decided to stick with minimal block colours to start, so as to keep the base as structured and as simple as possible. I then area than I usually doing creating different three and four sided shaped in order to sculpt the colour into giving the illusion of space.
After this I painted over it again, but instead of using a lot of colours (as I usually would I limited myself to three and white) in the hope of creating something simpler.
The affect this had was promising, the painting has a more complete composition that my others and in addition is more tonally balanced.
However it still needs a lot of work, from here I intend to expand upon the central purple square and add more architectural spaces around the corners the edges creating a distance effect. All of this will be done by using as large block colours as possible with possible some structural compliment masking lines added.
Composition Continued…..
These three images were originally intended to go in my ‘Masking tape” post, showing how much the tape bled and pulled off the paint.
However after looking through these images I started to realise how interesting they were and decided to write a post about them. These images pic up from the ones in my previous post- the only difference being instead of using a piece of paper to crop them I used my camera.
I started to think about how something so intricate would look on a large scale, and what affect it would have?
The main difference between these zoomed in images and the actual painting is that in these images there is both more and less going on.
In the full sized paintings there are more lines, patterns brush strokes ect, but due to their size the viewer fails to see what becomes the main vocal point of the zoomed in pictures: the subtle hue and tonal changes as one colour leaks into another, the patterns created by the brush strokes. Also the shapes are bigger in these images which creates a ‘vocal point’ in the painting- something that is missing in the actual paintings.
Looking at Composition
Lately I’ve been a bit preoccupied with the size of my work -how large or small I should make the canvas and what affect that would have on the viewer. Now I would like to talk a bit about composition, and how the combination of the lines and colours affects the overall feel of the painting.
During a tutorial with Jane, I explained that some of my larger paintings were looking too complex/ disordered and that the colours and lines didn’t work well together. She suggested making a cropping tool to see how the painting would look If I cropped it in certain areas.
I made a simple cropping tool out of two sheets of paper that when meet form a frame.
This exercise has the effect of magnifying the textures of the painting. When I zoomed in on a particular work I was fascinated how the entire composition has changed. The painting now has an entirely different focus- and because I was cropping the paintings quite a lot it has the effect of making the shapes bigger and making you really see the subtle changes in value that we’re apparent before.
For example when looking at Untitled close up (second image down) you can really start to appreciate the transition between the two colours and see each individual pattern made by the brush.
Looking at works in this scale draws the viewers attension to what was peviously overlooked, I think it would be interseting to make a series of minute works 5cm by 10cm for example to see what this effect would be like in actuality.
