While I work on creating a marketing plan and a free prelude for my novel, The Children of Gods and Monsters, that's now available on Amazon for Kindle, I thought I'd get my blog rolling with some posts on my photography work.
This last year I graduated from a Photography course at Durham College in Oshawa, Ontario. The school itself isn't an art school, and it's Photography course was relatively new, I was in the third graduating class, and I had originally signed up to get an understanding of how to properly work a camera, and because I felt like I needed to go back to school. I ended up really enjoying the course and stretching my creativity to try new things. There was one assignment I really loved, it was a photographic reinterpretation of classical works of art. Being an art nerd, I jumped at the chance to mimic some of my favourite pieces.
So to start it off, I'll share The Birth of Venus, Botticelli's most famous work.
Sandro Botticelli was an early Renaissance painter from Italy who lived between 1446 - 1510 and whose most famous works including The Birth of Venus and Primavera. While The Birth of Venus has been painted numerous times over, this version of Botticelli's is the most famous interpretation. Originally painted in the mid 1480's, The Birth of Venus depicts the birth of goddess, Venus, emerging from the sea as an adult as described in Poliziano's poem Stanze per la giostra.
It was painted with tempera, a fast-drying paint made of pigments and a water-soluble binder medium, sometimes the yokes of eggs were even used. This type of medium was commonly used in paintings before the invention of oil paint.
Today, the painting is on display at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy.
And here is my interpretation of the painting:
This series I did of the reinterpretations was the first series where I used composite images to create the final piece. I'd never done something like that before. I'd edited images in photoshop and done simple edits, but nothing as intense as composites... and after learning how to create them, I'm a bit stuck on them.
Anyway, this image is made up of numerous pieces, from the shore to the lake, to the shell, the model, and each individual flower. I also had to create the leaves and bring back some of the green in the background because I shot it in November, and up here in Canada, everything dies around that time.
Originally I was going to shoot three more models for the extra characters around Venus, but decided against it because, to be honest, I never really liked them there. I always thought they were too much of a distraction from Venus herself. My model was a friend of a friend who offered to help me with a couple of photos after my search for a model fell flat. She was amazing to work with, very professional, and an exceptional model, she also modelled for my reinterpretation of La Grande Odalisque, one of my favourite paintings, and one of my favourites from this series.
While editing, I also chose to do an oil painting overlay to give the photos a real painterly look, and I was really pleased with how that feature turned out.
Looking back on it there are areas I'd change. For instance the model's body could've been blended better (tan-lines are the pits) and I wish I had added more flowers, but one day I'll get back to these reinterpretations and clean them up.
Nevertheless, I was very proud with the final product of this photo. I remember it took a lot of hours of editing, but I love the way the colours feel similar to the original, and I've always loved the little flower additions around the model's body.
Tomorrow, I'll be posting about David with the Head of Goliath.
If you're interested in seeing the other photos in this series, you can find them here.
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And, you can check out my debut novel, The Children of Gods and Monsters, in the Amazon store here.