Blog 4

For my Final Project, I think I would like to continue with my ideas from the last post, but i'm changing and expanding on a few things. I really like the idea of two unexpected elements coming together as in the mashup Jon Schmidt did of Taylor Swift's "Love Story" and Coldplay's "Viva la Vida". Keeping this mashup idea in mind, I took a look at Fred Tomaselli's work. He uses collage of small icons repetitively to create one large image isn't just pretty; but mesmerizing. You can't always tell that he has composed an image of a hand with hundreds of tiny fingers cut out, but you can see the smaller bits coming together to make something intricate and wonderful.

Somewhere along the line I started putting these two ideas together, but the idea was still unfinished. I wanted to see how the big idea of "beauty" could be tested. How much ugly

could you add in to make it interesting, but keep it visually beautiful. I realize that beauty is subjective, and for that matter so is ugly, but how much can you combine the two so that what you are creating is actually beautiful. I think a great mainstream example of this is th

e vision of Tim Burton. Whether Nightmare Before Christmas, The Corpse Bride, or the highly anticipated Alice and Wonderland, there is something sinister and gorgeous all at the same time. Check out some promos for AIW:

As for how this relates to my project... I want to take a base image and "collage" it with things that aren't traditionally thought of as pretty to make an intricate and (hopefully) beautiful final portrait.

To match the different skin tones and colors, I would really like to explore color channels and color sampling to create different tints to have a multidimensional but homogeneous final piece.