Digital Photography & Imaging: Project 2A (Self-titled)

Seerat Tayyab Mukhtar Qureshi - 0345576 (BDCM)

Digital Photography & Imaging

Project 2A: Self-titled 

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Instructions:

Mr. Fauzi gave us a brief introduction on this project in our lecture, our instructions were:

“Self-titled is an exploration project for the students to express their own individuality and reflect their personality into digital art self-expression. The main idea is to build up self-confidence and discover their interest.” 

The first step was to come up with a basic outline of our idea;

My idea outline: 

I want to create more of a collage like composition because I think it is a nice way to represent personality because in a collage all the pieces do not fit together perfectly but when you see it at once it makes sense. This represents me because at first I am an introvert but I am also very social with my friends so my personality can be confusing at first. In the collage I want to include elements that represent my interests and traits such as where I am from, my favourite places, my hobbies and some things that I look forward to achieving in the future. I also want to experiment with displacing my face as done in reference #1 as a way to emphasise the different components that make me who I am. 

References:

These are supposed to help us streamline our ideas and get a visual understanding of what the final piece should look like. We had find 3 references from Pinterest.

Fig 1.0: Reference #1

Fig 1.1: Reference #2

Fig 1.2: Reference #3

I liked reference #2 the most and I thought it was the most similar to my idea of a collage like composition

Sketches:

I sketched out my ideas of how I wanted my composition to look.

Fig 1.3: Sketching out a basic composition idea

Photography of self:

I really love the ocean and the beach so I wanted to make my work using pictures of me at the beach because I feel most like myself there. 

Design elements:

I want to include geometric shapes to balance out the composition so to mirror my idea that even though in a collage all the pieces don’t fit perfectly together, they still look balanced and stable. My idea is to use images of my interests and cut them out in circles or rectangles using Photoshop. I also want to include a small outline drawing of my face to show my love for art and drawing.

The beach, travelling and some of my favourite artworks from the KL Art Expo. All pictures are taken by me.

Typography design:

Since I was going with a collage design, I also really like the idea of using typography that’s made of magazine cutouts like ransom letters as it adds to the idea that they don’t fit but you’re still able to read and understand the message. I used this technique in one of my Design Principles assignment (included below). I want the words to spell out SEER because not only is that my nickname, it also means a person who sees visions of the future and this is a way of showing my strong ambitions for my future. I will get the letters digitally.

Fig 1.4: Example from my design principle work.

Mr. Fauzi gave me some feedback regarding my ideas. He said said that my ideas were good but I just had to be careful not to completely include other people’s designs as a whole but rather cut and alter them in a way that would be original and unique.

I combined all these elements to come up with a first draft composition.

Fig 1.5: Draft composition 

Description:

I used the ocean and pictures of art and paintings to show what I like and  represent my personality. I used the white lines to show my love for illustration and also reflect on my habit of doodling on everything. The paper texture in the back also emphasises this. I used that picture of myself because I want to show as if I am looking into myself. The words SEER are my nickname but they also mean someone who is able to see into the future so I used this as a  way to represent my strong ambitions and dreams for my future. I am considering changing out the circular picture as it might be a bit gory. I included it because it was one of my favourite pieces of art.

Feedback: 

Mr. Fauzi suggested I use a different image one which had more of my face in it, so I swapped it out for the circle picture because I think it could be misleading.

After his feedback I worked on my final piece and came up with this.

Fig 1.6: Final piece

Reflection:

I found that for this project I really had to use knowledge that I had gained from previous exercises. This made it a lot easier and definitely a lot faster. I enjoyed this project quite a lot because I love working with collages and photomontage in Photoshop.