Unit 2

My statement of intent.

For my project I am doing my main project on portraits and figuratives of my friends and family as comic book characters in traditional art media (pencil drawings, paintings, charcoals, etc).
To include my unit 2 into this, I plan to take portrait and figure photographs of my friends and family to use as primary research in my piece and I also am going to look into townscapes and landscapes and such for the backgrounds of my compositions. I'm going to be looking primarily at portrait and fine art photography and delve into some of the other ones with certain characters/people.


WW2 Propaganda combined with Captain America and Red Skull

For one of my pieces I plan on producing 2 propaganda posters in a world war II style of both the USA and Nazi Germany and using comic book characters Captain America and The Red Skull as my subject characters based on their allegiances. In research I found the key features to both types of art.
The main themes in US propaganda is duty, patriotism and tradition and are used to encourage support of the war with enlistment and buying war bonds, whereas propaganda of Nazi Germany focused on grandeur and fueling the hatred of the enemy.

Photographs from the War

Tony Vaccaro

W. Eugene Smith

Dave Jenkins

W. Eugene Smith

This image is an emphasis on the patriotism aspect of the US propaganda.

This poster gives a kindness impression which fits perfectly for what I'm after,
but also with an important message to support the war

This poster is heavy on the theme of team work in war

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This nazi poster gives off a very intimidating vibe to it, most likely using the enemy as the target audience. The armada of tanks displays the force they have at their disposal and I like how the helmet hides half of the face so that the viewer can imagine themselves in their place

The colors in this piece are really strong again using headwear to hide the eyes to not give the character a real face. The theme of this piece is patriotism but in a more defensive manner

This poster focuses on fear used to display the travesties of war. It's almost like a plead for help which is engaging with the audience in a different way, whilst the other posters focus on war in a positive light, this one displays it in a negative way.

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Ike:

Captain America

For the patriotism angle I had Ike pose in this regal manner with the fan cover acting as a shield prop (it will be bigger in the drawing/painting) Ike lifting his head shows a sense of pride and the light is used to show the full body rather than hide any darkness.

These two photos were motion shot, because of the movement they came out blurry which isn't ideal but it's fine to paint from, I'm not sure which looks better yet but I will see after some touch ups in photoshop.

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Yves:

The themes I went with Yves' poses where madness and pride. In a way I am creating a caricature of fascism,  by expressing what they're opinions where but exaggerating things like turning pride into narcism and emphasizing the insanity.

I used a box as a prop because I plan on replacing it with The Tesseract from comic books, this photo goes with the narcism theme in that Yves is in power and proud of that fact.

I like the angle of this shot it shows in a way Yves standing above everyone else in a grades fashion.

This is to be replaced with Yves holding a Nazi flag or text of some sort in a flag manner

To assist in my painting I created this mock up of how I can adapt the original image into what I want it to look like. There will be more changes but mainly due to clothing.

Clayface
For my Clayface project I looked at the movement of mud and water and how ripples are created through force, Based on the character i looked into slow shutter speed photography to see if I could create a photograph to work from where movement is captured as a solid object. I had Mat move his arms and body as I took slow shutter photographs of him to capture all the movement but the results didn't match what I had in mind.

Although my initial ideas didn't pan out I can still use these photographs to enforce reference through my images. After these didn't work I took to just creating figurative photographs because my aim is to  create an abstract painting and these slow shutter photos work as directions for brush strokes.

I used photoshop to produce some concept art where I manipulated photos of mat to match my needs and provide me some guidance for my painting.

This angle I took to make Mat look taller, it gives him a larger presence

Finally using my photographs of Yves for the Red Skull and looking into Nazi propaganda posters, I created this photoshop manipulation to produce a piece to work from for my final paintings.

I started by creating this layer of a nazi soldier re imagined as a hydra agent using this photo of yves

I found an image of nazi uniform online and I cut out the helmet, sleeves and torso and warped it to Yves structure.

I then coloured the uniform green, replaced the swastika band with a hydra logo and drew on some yellow goggles. For the flag I simply found a waving flag online, colorized it red and added a hydra logo. I then warped the logo and added some burn effects to act as ripples on the flag.

I finally added a filter to the piece to match the tone up with the rest of the poster.

I then began the actual Red Skull manipulation starting with this photograph of Yves.

The first step was to cut out the head and neck to work with the skull. I began with adding a fresco filter to the piece, this will accentuate the dark areas of yves face particularly the eyes and nose. I then put the contrast up to 100% and with all my light areas lightened and dark areas darkened I adjusted the image to a threshold. This converts the image to a black and white picture. I then selected the white area through color range and replaced all the white in the layer with red, this leaving me with a red and black head.
My final steps were to erase the eye from the over layer to have his eye showing through and I painted in the centre of the nose. I then found an image of a skull online and fit the teeth of the skull over Yves' mouth and adjusted the blending on the layer giving the image a subtle blend into the face.
I then used the liquify tool just to enforce the cheek bones a bit more and stretch the skull since I had erased his hair and so my final step was to add a small mosaic tile texture filter.

My next step was to edit the cube, all I did for that was using the polygonal select tool select each side of the cube and give it a blue gradient fill keeping the tone the same on each side. I then added a couple of filters to see what effects I could get from it.

At this stage my piece was still looking a bit bear

So to fix that I first put in a background, most war posters simply had a sky or battlefield background so I took an image of clouds I found online and stretched it to the page, I then added a blending effect to the blank layer underneath which gave it the beige kind of coloring most war posters have.

Before

After

My next problem was the gap at the bottom, I planned to put text on the image later but it wouldn't make the difference I needed so thinking of why the flag bearer would be there I needed an army for him to lead somewhere. I found an image of nazi soldiers saluting and cut the background from them. I then added a threshold effect to the image and placed it nicely in front of the skull layer and behind the flag bearer layer.

My piece as it looked at this stage

I still felt the top of the piece was a bit bear so I found an image of a prototype Nazi aircraft that looked very futuristic and seeing as how other nazi posters would show off their army I decided mine should do the same so I copied the image and pasted it into the top left corner of the page. I Then duplicated the image and flipped it dragging it over the other side so that the piece was symmetrical.

The last thing to add to my poster was the text, I came up with the slogan for the piece of "you are needed. March!" because to me that is more of a demand than a request and is somewhat intimidating and threatening than asking for help. I then translated this to german (re translating it a few times to fine tune the translation) and found a font online called Tannenberg Fett. Using an online site I put in my german translation and copied the image of the font and placed it on my poster.

To replace the black font with white I merely inverted the color and using color select again I added a black stroke to the selected edges.

My piece was then finished.

Evaluation.

I explored my initial theme through studio figurative photography of friends as portraits.

I then planned to create various conceptual pieces through photoshop where I manipulate the original photographs into ones I can work from for my main project.

My research into shutter speed, lighting and camera angles helped as it gave me ideas to create a composition with and the effect these can have for example the shot of Yves or Mat from below looking up gives them both a grand tall gesture to them which is what I was going for.

The shutter speed researched helped me with the clay face photographs of Mat since I tried slow shutter speed with him and although it didn't work the way I planned it gave me movement to work from.

My final piece is presented as a tool for me to use for my final piece in my main project. I could have worked from the original photographs and manipulated them physically throw painting but this has saved me time and possibility of error. It has also shown me what my final piece should looking like when it's done. I plan to present this in my book and on my blog because it is part of my development work.

The strengths of this body of work shows me what I can accomplish with the right photographs and editing tools and how I can use all the elements collected to create a composition. The weaknesses however is that of how I tend to rely more on manipulation as opposed to photography because I see myself as a painter rather than a photographer and I like to create surreal fantasy images that I cannot create through photography (not easily anyway)

This sort of piece I would expect to find in an online blog possibly showing a tutorial of how to create compositions or manipulations with photographs, but also like mentioned in my book as my development work.