Organic Surrealism

This assignment was a bit of a stretch for me. I've never been a huge fan of surrealism, I appreciate some of it, but it was difficult for me to try and create surreal pieces.  I'm happy with one or two of my pieces but it was a struggle for me. Although by the last few compositions, I realized that I'm starting to get the hang of Photoshop. I'm able to navigate the different options pretty well. 
My main thought was to take some something normal, but make it abnormal. That's kind ofwhat I think of when I think of Surrealism. Like Dali and his clocks. The clocks were normal, but then he goes and melts them. I don't know if I was that successful with my approach but I tried. 

Real vs Surreal

For the "Real" part of this assignment my approach was to pick a theme with some objects I had around the house, I also wanted to play with colors. My first one is a game theme, I enjoy playing board, and card games and  I thought the colors of all the different pieces would make an interesting composition. My second piece is based on a summer camp that I have worked at for the past four years and I'm going back for my 5th summer. It's become almost like a second home so it was a easy pick for me to use pieces that represent Starlight. My third is a generation theme. I have at least one object belonging to myself, my mother, my grandmother and my great grandmother. I put them together in an arrangement alluding to a jewelry chest and went for a bright color scheme.

For the "Surreal" part I started with no really plan. I basically scanned a bunch of random pieces and hoped for the best. The first one I scanned some different playing cards. After messing around with the warp tool I made a rain drop shape and that how that piece evolved. The second is several crochet needles. I like these just because the colors are so vibrant. I warped them a bit, layered them, and then used several filters. The third I started layering a leaf earring I scanned and I created a wing like shape from there I kept seeing an insect and I had fun playing with different filters.

First Assingment

For this first assignment I was interested in exploring all the different brush shapes there are in Photoshop, and different filters. I played around with them creating different textures, by using multiple layers, and different sized brushes. I also discovered the overlay option towards the end and had fun layering colors on top of each other as well. There is no correlation between the different pieces, each one was made a different way trying to create something different from the one before.