Hello! For today, I wanted to begin the experimentation stage of this project, and the first person I wanted to become inspired by is the one and only Geloy Conception! In this, I will be going through why I chose this man to be inspired from, what techniques I used along with reviewing my products!
So, as I have said, why did I choose Geloy Conception? The reason why is simply because I love his work and message. The message his work is, and mainly his "Something You Wish You Said" series, is to connect people. When I say this, I mean that he has a bunch of people come to his website and tell him their struggles or problems. He then creates art with it, and when people see it on his platforms, they comment on the words and talk to it as if the people who submitted those messages are reading.
I found the concept beautiful, along with the usage of old photos are also amazing. For me, it gives the effect that these are things that the photos wanted to say, and the person in the photos is usually either cut out or painted over, which signifies that they have moved on in life from those photos, and are literally writing back to themselves, which I think is amazing.
That is why I was inspired by this man's work to begin to create my own. Now, these pieces I have made also have things I wish I could say, but I don't think I can due to personal reasons, so if they come off as weird I can only apologise but it makes sense to me. But before we look at the images themselves, we should have a look at how I made these images.
This is the diagram for the first photo I wanted to take. As you can see, it's very similar to experimentation 2, and that's because I used this exact blueprint for the experimentation 2 pieces. As the diagram says, this was made in two parts, photography, and editing.
But before I start on that, I should probably highlight what the plan for this was in an overall statement. The objective of this plan was to create a piece that both replicated the old, grime-y look of a Geloy photograph using editing to create an older look on a modern camera (I am already familiar with modern cameras compared to older ones) along with using the specific items in the frame to also look old, for somebody against a brick wall is basically timeless. I also wanted the focus to be around the message I would write "Sometimes I wish I was me." Although this text got changed during the editing, it means the same thing, and I was also particular with the items in the frame and smaller parts like the vignette to push the focus on the message.
And since I am already talking about the editing, let's go through with it. What things did I write down to do to try and make this look how I wanted? Well, I first wrote that I wanted "Grain and Slight Damage" and I was planning on doing this by using the grain filter, along with finding a texture to lay over the image to make that damaged film kind of look. For the hand-drawn look of the text, my plan was to either use the brush tool and the right look to try and make it look as real as possible or instead take a photo of my writing and superimpose the text over the image. I also wanted a cutout kind of look for the person, and my plan was to use the lasso tool to cut them out and use the bucket tool to paint the missing look with white, or instead, I would print out the final piece with everything there onto high-quality A3, and actually cut out the figure using a pair of scissors to then scan it back into a digital format. One more thing I wanted to do is to make the overall picture warmer with a focus on a slight purple, which the idea was inspired by another picture that Geloy has posted, and I was going to do this using a colour overlay on a low opacity, but during editing, I both found better ways to achieve the warmness but also not liking the idea of using purple in the final product.
Now that I have covered all of the editing parts, let's talk about the photography side. This part was a whole lot more literal compared to the editing stage, with simple demands like "Flash On", meaning that I would just turn the flash mode on when I took the photo, or the "brick wall", where I did that by finding an actual brick wall to shoot against, since I didn't feel like doing more editing then necessary, and I don't think I've done enough research to try and put somebody in a realistic looking place with just a green screen. Other parts as well like "quite a high shutter speed" were achieved by using manual mode on the camera, and turning the shutter speed all the way up to 1/4000 shutter speed.
This is the second diagram I made! This one was made after the first one and inspired by Geloy once again. Not any sort of specific kind of photo of his, but instead of just his general style. I knew I already wanted to make this in college, so I tried to sketch out roughly what the outside canteen area looked like but did not directly say it. Honestly, I'm not too sure why I didn't say it then but I can't change it now.
But enough dilly-dallying, what was the plan for this image? Well, the plan for this image was to take a photo that gives that alone sort of feeling, with nobody else around to focus on the main message that I was happy that I broke him and am happier alone in the message, whilst the environment is cold, desolate and only focused on the person to make sure that the viewer knows this is a personal message that could be written by the person cut out of the photo. Apart from this plan to also create an old-looking photo that's inspired by Geloy's photos, despite the environment that I had access to and only having a short amount of time to use said environment. Like the first diagram though, I mainly wanted to also use objects in frame, focus and colour to convey a story.
So, what editing tricks did I wanna try to use so I could fulfil the visualization diagram I drew? Well, for the first want, I said I wanted the text to look hand drawn. I had two options like last time, either use a real brush to draw it digitally or instead use actual paper and a pen to put the text onto the image. With this though, I didn't say here but I also wanted to experiment with different pens, so I had on hand a regular ballpoint, a felt tip pen and a painting pen with a very long but flexible tip, which is great for colouring things in along with giving a really stylized and natural look to drawing and writing. I also wanted to make the same "cut-out" look, and I wanted to achieve this by mainly just doing the lasso tool because I didn't want this to take longer than I wanted it to. I should also add that the reason why I wanted to try and use a real pen or a hand-drawn look is that it gives a lot more emotion in the text, one of almost falling apart of frustration compared to the neat writing of the text tool or writing properly, along with the cut-out theme is one I wanted to carry form Geloy's work since I thought it was a clever idea that had an effective look to the overall piece.
For the photography side of this, I first wrote a couple of basic things like somebody being sat at the table, which I achieved by asking a fellow pupil of mine, to shout out to Kayleigh for being so willing to take time out of her day to do a quick shoot. Having somebody there also made it easier to cut out a person-shaped hole in the piece, since you will see in other work that's coming soon, I'm not very good at anatomy. I wrote things in the scene like "Kazeebow" because I didn't know how to spell gazebo, along with the wood platform that the bench would sit on. This basically just made sure I would only have the college's canteen part to shoot at. I also said that I wanted a short F stop as well, to try and get a blurry shot. To achieve this, I wanted to use manual mode to turn down the F stop so we could get a lovely blur on the background, once again focusing on the person at hand.
Well, now that we know how I planned and went through ideas, let's look at the tools used to create the final pieces of this experimentation.
This is the first piece I made! As you can see, I used quite a few processes. Before any of this though, I did a photoshoot with the lovely Kayleigh, a classmate of mine who agreed to walk around in the rain just for me, as you can tell by the rain on her glasses in the cover photo. We took a couple of different photos which I shall show throughout this, but I decided to make one, and super focus on two other photos since I already had written out the plans for those photos.
After this shoot, I quickly moved these into photoshop since I'm very comfortable with using this software and began creating. I first cut out the actress using a lasso to replicate how Geloy, then did some colour correction to create a colder atmosphere since I thought that matched the message. After this, I added one grain, brightness and contrast, and lens blur after experimenting with other options like film green, Gaussian blur and white overlays I messed a whole bunch around with the blur, grain, photo filter and hue to make sure they were all just about right, with a realistic, aged kind of look similar to the pictures that Geloy uses.
There was something missing about this though, I wanted to have something written on there. I first had the idea of using the brush tool and writing it that way, but instead what I did was write something on paper using different pens, take a photo of it, put them into photoshop And use a picture of the eraser tool and the magic wand tool to only leave the black text. I didn't like the colour of the black after looking at it for a long time, so I used the invert tool to turn it white instead without losing the detail I have in it. I also had a problem with there being a white border around the text despite my efforts, so what I did was go into layer style to turn on stroke, set it to inside and set the colour to black to fix the white edge before I inverted the text.
After positioning the text in an area which I am happy with, despite using grain and blur, I wasn't happy with how it all looked. So, I decided to try and find a way to fix this, and very luckily I found some assets online that are used to add a dust texture over your images, so I downloaded them hastily, put some of them into photoshop, layer them over the images and turn them from normal opacity to screen opacity. I didn't like how there were only white specs though, so though trying things like the colour overlay option in layer style, I found that if I inverted the image and set it to multiply opacity, it got rid of all the white and only kept the white, which is the opposite of screen. With this, I layered one black texture over a white texture to give a more aged look. Now, let's look at the tools I used for the other experiment
This is the second picture I have made! This is, like the last photo, majorly influenced by the diagrams of what I wanted these pieces to look like, and so I edited accordingly. You may notice that there are an awful lot more tools like levels, raw camera filters ETC. I did forget some things though like the fact I added film grain to this piece due to the warmer darker tone it had, but nevertheless.
This was also taken in the same shoot, with a little more thought put into it. I wanted to achieve a look where it looks like this picture was shot inside a dark room with only a flash, but the problem with that was that I was outside when it was bright. After thinking for a bit, I realised that if I used a high shutter speed, the camera would only be able to get a small amount of light in, making things look dark. So, if I used a flash at the same time, I would have the same effect of having a dark brick wall inside, whilst still being outside!
This photo came out the best of all of them in my opinion, mainly because I put more thought into it but that's beside the point. After taking this photo, I went back. inside and began editing. I first cut out the actress first, to give it that look that Geloy has. I was contemplating if I should instead of cutting her out again, make it so that her face and body are painted out, using perhaps a thick acrylic set, a black surface and a paintbrush, but due to not having the resources on hand I couldn't do that, so I did the lasso again to keep in theme.
With not happy with the lasso on the white background though, so I decided to add a paper texture in its place. The reason why is that I thought it gave the piece a more aged, more physical picture rather than a simple image with a solid white background. This part isn't inspired by Geloy though, this was my own independent thought. So after finding a good texture online, I added it to photoshop and layered it underneath the image.
One thing I didn't like about his asset, or the photograph I took was its brightness. At first, I thought I could fix this by simply using the brightness/contrast sliders, but after experimenting with them I decided to try the levels instead. I first used the levels and turned them into an adjustment layer. I know I called it a smart filter but I can only apologise, sometimes I get things wrong. This will affect everything underneath the piece, which is exactly what I wanted. I also used levels on the paper asset too, but I applied them directly onto the piece rather than making a layer out of it.
I also realised the adjustment layer messed around with the paper layer, I used the brush tool to paint around the paper area so it wasn't affected by the adjustment levels. After this, I added the usual blur, and photo filter but made sure it was warm this time and hue/saturation slides, this time mainly focusing on the reds and the greens since without affecting them it looked unusual.
This photo came out the best of all of them in my opinion, mainly because I put more thought into it but that's beside the point. After taking this photo, I went back. inside and began editing. I first cut out the actress first, to give it that look that Geloy has. I was contemplating if I should instead of cutting her out again, make it so that her face and body are painted out, using perhaps a thick acrylic set, a black surface and a paintbrush, but due to not having the resources on hand I couldn't do that, so I did the lasso again to keep in theme.
After this, looking at my diagram I realised I wanted to add some vignettes in the photo to make a more spotlight-like product. With this goal, I first wanted to use radial gradients to see if I could get the effect I wanted, which I didn't. So, instead of that, I looked up a way to do it and found that you can use raw camera settings on regular JPGs using raw photo filters, so I did exactly that and added a healthy amount of vignettes. I also saw that they had grain built in too, so if I do this again I might use that too.
around now, where I wrote on a piece of paper, took a photo of it, used a magic wand and colour selection to get rid of the white and invert it to make it white. This time though, I used the lasso and move tool to rearrange the text into a more cubic kind of shape, along with one of the words not fitting in the cube shape, to give more meaning that I don't feel like I'm the same as the rest in more than one way. I also wanted to add colour to the words out of the box, so using the brush tool, I made a new layer, Drew a letter pink and a letter blue, and turned it into a clipping mask onto the text, making the pink and blue only. affect the text and nowhere more outside of the lines.
And after these two processes, we finally have the products we shall look at very shortly. Like, literally right after this sentence is done you'll be able to see the first product, Experimentation 1.
This is the first one! I think they came out absolutely amazing, the colder colours with no real prominent colour make this feel so still, although there could be improvements I think they're pretty damn good. I should probably say that the main difference between these two versions is the text along with the paper texture since to me it looks a little different, but I may just be crazy. I should also say that I review my own pieces differently compared to other ones, where I ask things like what I think about the work, whether was it successful and what would I do differently, amongst others.
So, what do I think of the work I have produced here? I think it's really good for a first try. There are a lot of things tried in this piece, and although others have had more time to create, this as a first piece is beautiful.
Was it successful? I think so absolutely. I did everything I wanted to do on the plan I set out for myself and even more, with testing of other things like lens blur, using different backgrounds for the cutout and even an alternative style of text.
What would I do differently? I would absolutely change the white paper into a different colour, to try and give a more popping look to this piece rather than the overall blue kind of feeling, maybe a red paper to compare with the evil thing to say that is "I'm glad I broke him", perhaps a darker red even. I would also change how I did the selection, it's really selective around the model. compared to Geloys work not being as specific, the model looks like it was cut out using scissors compared. Apart from that though, that's about it.
How could I develop this further? Quite easily, I feel like I could use the text in many different ways. Maybe a pattern in Adobe Illustrator, or maybe inspired by the text, my own hand-drawn font, and even a Lino print and silk screen! I could also see this photo edited differently. or even drawn instead of photography to give a more sketchy kind of look. With this I could also turn the silhouette into its own design, using many small mediums to see how it would look.
Is this something I would revisit in this project? Absolutely. This is such a fun project to work on and I would love to see this even more and explore it in further pieces and absolutely my final project. But now that we have done the first graphic, let's look at the second one.
This is the second photo. For me, this is easily the better one out of the two. The colours are much better although it could be a small bit better, that's a lot better than the many problems with the first part. Okay, I lie this could be much more improved. You also might ask, why did you make the "me." in trans pride colours? to which my response is ":3". Some of my favourite parts of this are the wider use of colours, and the more old-looking feel of this picture, although it isn't perfect.
So, what do I think of this piece? I think of this piece being extremely personal, with small touches of colour on the text, along with the brick wall which is a hint of how it feels like I am trapped behind a brick wall I can't get over yet. I also love the vignette, which I meant to be how it feels like the biggest boundary and the spotlight of my upsets.
Was it successful? I like to think so! The diagram looks quite close to the final project, despite a couple of things like how there was supposed to be a more significant influence of the 2/3rds framing and for the model to be on the right instead of the middle left. I also like the subtle taste of grain used, it looks really nice, oh and the amount of white used, I think that looks awesome.
What would I do differently? Well, there's this weird warping part in the middle of the background, so if I learnt how I would fix that distortion to it either look more normal or that it's closer t the background. I also would change the colour of the paper to a minor beige instead to get that age's kind of look, maybe even little tares, but let's see. I would also make the colour warmer overall since it's not red enough. I shouldn't have messed with the red now that I think about it.
How could I develop this further? Perchance I could make a whole bunch of different versions of the text, or even make this into a GIF with the letters or words popping into existence and dancing around. Or instead, I could do smaller modifications and make a mock-up design of the text since I feel like it would be a cool trans-rights design. Or instead, I could make the letters different colours to be more inclusive of other genders and/or sexualities.
Would I revisit this? Well, I just did already, but I would like to revisit these images once again since I find them quite interesting and have a lot of potential.
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