Mysterical

Photography, Watercolor, Photoshop (fresco filter)

Date photo taken: 10/19/2018
Date watercolor created: 11/13/2018
Date edited: 11/15/18

Before beginning my work on this project I had begun creating watercolor paintings based off of the work of Czech Art Nouveau artist Alphonse Mucha. I admire the dual simplicity of his style and the complexity of his medium and subjects. I also began researching Mucha because of his Czech origins. I am of Czech descent and wanted to discover more about the art and culture of where I am from. I loved working on the watercolor portraits as they helped me explore Czech culture, work with Art Nouveau (which is something I do not have much experience with), as well as continue my watercolor portrait work. Because I loved working on these portraits I thought that it would be interesting to try to do a similar project using photography and Photoshop. A key part of this project for me was gaining more experience with Photoshop and the tools it offers. To begin this project I chose one of the portraits that I took at Hobby Lobby earlier in the semester. I wanted to choose a portrait that was simple but that I also felt expressed a serene quality, which I like to express in my work as art is a way for e to release control and gain peace. I then made a small grayscale watercolor painting of the pattern that I wanted in my background. I have been drawn to background of concentric circles with gradations and patterns created from that. The next step of the project was working with Photoshop, which proved to be more difficult than I expected, but that I was able to receive help with. I wanted to isolate the subject of the portrait photo from the background, and place the figure on the watercolor background that I had created. To do this I was able to use the magnetic select tool and the eraser tool to select and refine the portrait. I was then able to copy and paste the subject onto the background. One area that I did end up running into some trouble was figuring out how to put filters onto the image and have it affect the entire image, not just one layer like Photoshop wanted to do. To do this I saved the image as a jpeg. file and then reopened that image in Photoshop and was able to edit it that way. I loved playing with the different filters and fine tuning them to the way that I wanted. My favorite filter is the fresco filter, and that is the one that I used on this project. I think it is incredibly interesting to see the difference in the before and after of the image after filters are applied. Overall I think that this was a successful project, as I was able to experiment more in depth with Photoshop, learn skills that I can use in the future, as well as end up with a result that I enjoy.