Culture Jamming

The first time I ever saw Dolce & Gabbana's Winter 2007 ad campaign, I was shocked. The image, a man holding a woman to the ground by her wrists as a group of men look on, absolutely disgusted me, not only its overt sexuality but for its blatantly violent nature as well. I hated the idea of some little girl looking at this photo and finding it to be acceptable, even appealing, so I decided that this would be a great candidate for a culture jam.

While looking around online for some inspiration, I stumbled across the painting "Tarquinius and Lucretia", painted by Hans von Aachen. The painting depicts this story:

"Tarquinius was besieging Ardea, a city of the Rutulians. The place could not be taken by force, and the Roman army lay encamped beneath the walls. Here as the king's sons, and their cousin, Tarquinius Collatinus, the son of Egerius, were feasting together, a dispute arose about the virtue of their wives. As nothing was happening in the field, they mounted their horses to visit their homes by surprise. They first went to Rome, where they sur­prised the king's daughters at a splendid banquet. They then hastened to Collatia, and there, though it was late in the night, they found Lucretia, the wife of Collatinus, spinning amid her handmaids. The beauty and virtue of Lucretia had fired the evil passions of Sextus. A few days later he returned to Collatia, where he was hospitably received by Lucretia as her husband's kinsman. In the dead of night he entered the chamber with a drawn sword ; by threatening to lay a slave with his throat cut beside her, whom he would pretend to have killed in order to avenge her husband's honour, he forced her to yield to his wishes.  

"[After the ordeal], she killed herself." -Wikipedia

It disgusted me how similar these two pictures were, especially with such a tragic story inspiring the painting. With this, I had already set my heart on creating a comparison between the two to send the message that it's unacceptable in this day and age for advertisers to convey such a sexual and violent message. Violence against women is something that should never be tolerated, and hopefully a culture jam such as the one I made can make the point that such obvious oppression is incredibly backwards.

For the culture jam itself, I first decided that it would be interesting to take the general design of the 2007 ad and transfer it over to the painting. It certainly looked cool, but it wasn't enough to actually show the similarities between the two images. I fooled around with layering them, placing them next to each other, among other things, but finally decided on creating a .gif that switched between the two pictures fairly quickly. This made the similarities somewhat obvious and was much more eye-catching than before.

Finally, I decided to turn the .gif into a billboard in New York City, to make it look a bit more realistic and interesting to the eye. I think it came out pretty well, and I enjoyed fooling around with video timeline on CS6. This was definitely an awesome project for the fact that it made you think about all of the advertisements we experience each day and how damaging they can be. I really enjoyed this project, and will definitely use quite a few of the techniques I learned in doing it (especially .gifs) in the future.

Elephas Insecta Odobenus

Let me just say that this project was pretty awesome. It was a ton of fun fooling around on Photoshop, meshing different types of animals together, as well as playing with different picture angles and coloring. It's such a cool concept, playing God in the creation of crazy animal morphs, all while attempting to make them look somewhat plausible in an interesting environment.

I opted for the butterfly ears on a whim, since the wing shape was somewhat similar to that of an elephant's ear. I thought it looked pretty cool as it was, but wanted to make something a bit more interesting, so I decided to change up the body. For the body, I wanted to pick an animal with a somewhat similar skin texture to the elephant, but with a completely different shape to it. With this, I settled on the walrus, who I have always felt very fondly towards with its adorable whiskers and stunningly shapeless form. The entire project involved a lot of layer masks to morph together each animal part, as well as distortion, stamping, and hue changes to best create a realistic morph. And that's how I formulated this gem of a creature.

It did take quite a while though, to find morphs that actually worked together, and with animals I actually liked. In fact, the majority of this project was just picking which animals and pictures to morph together. I tried guinea pigs, horses, owls, sloths (my favorite), cats, and even ladybugs before finally settling on my final morph. Though, I must say that my sloth/owl combination was pretty fantastic:

angel sloth<3

I think that my morph came out pretty well. Of course, there's little things that I wish looked a bit better despite my attempts to fix them in Photoshop, but I still like what I made quite a bit. Awesome project overall, would definitely do it again.

Graffiti Time!

This project was pretty involved, so I'll talk about each of the steps it took to reach the final look (not for any reason, I just feel like it):

Using a Bamboo tablet in Illustrator, I started playing around with different custom brushes that would achieve a graffiti-like effect. I finally settled on a more simple, rounded brush, and began to sketch out my tag.

I decided on the name "Alpha" because of an inside joke I have with my twin. I was the first twin born, hence "Alpha", and she was the second, which led to her the nickname, "Baby-B". You need street names in a place as rough and tumble as Dorset, after all.

The tag needed some more depth and interest to it, so I picked out a slightly thicker brush and went in underneath the letters to create a shadow. I also thickened the outer lines a bit to make a some contrast between the inner and outer lines of the letters.

Next, it was time to add some color to both the space within the letters and surrounding the word itself to make the tag a bit more interesting.

The tag was still pretty bland, so I went in with a thin white brush and began to highlight certain parts of the letters. This creates more of a 3D effect, as if the letters are actually raised off of the page. I also added a translucent white line directly underneath the highlight, which took a bit of the harshness away and added some realism to it, along with a shadow directly underneath the letters in a slightly darker orange for extra depth (thank you, Mr. Molinelli). Finally, I added yet another surrounding color to the entire tag in my favorite color.

Now for the hard part. Somehow, I had to take the tag I made in Illustrator and put it on an actual wall, so that it would appear as if I had actually graffitied it. This took a lot of toying around with the opacity and perspective, which I used distort and skew to achieve. I also went in with a textured eraser at 50-60% opacity and strategically removed color from certain parts of the tag. And that's it!

This project was a lot of fun and, to be honest, quite challenging. I had a pretty rough time trying to place the tag onto the wall without completely disfiguring it in the process, but it was fun trying to figure it out all the while. I also really enjoyed going back to my roots with Illustrator, as well as working with highlight and shadow to achieve a more interesting look. I've never done anything like this before, but I'd love to do it again (legally, of course).

Photomontage Fit for a Queen

I don't think I'll ever be completely happy with a project like this, but I think it looks okay. Kind of blurry in places from transforming, but it may just be my eyes as well. It was a lot of fun, though, as I was able to take random things that amuse me and turn it into something representative of my personality. I think it does me justice : )