I have been having so much fun working on these creative, fine art pieces for myself. There is a certain level of joy that comes from allowing yourself to be inspired and to find a way to create the vision in your head. Especially since for so long, I didn’t acknowledge my own creativity, which is really easy to do when you feel surrounded by talented, brilliant individuals.

You may recall that this new (yet-to-be-titled) series is a self portrait series dealing with emotions or traits like hope, strength, faith, growth, etc… You can see a little about my first piece, Hope, here or my second piece, Sorrow, here or even my third piece, Strength, here. This particular image came to me one day as I was thinking about feelings and how we can easily feel two things at once. Like I can be happy for you but sad for me. It also got me thinking about the myriad of emotions I can feel in any one situation, and as I was mentally running through the emotions – this image popped into my head and I knew I had to create it.

I’m sure we’ve all had a moment like this. One where your anger and frustration build to a point where you feel like you could explode. A moment where you want to just scream, exorcising that pent up rage. Because of the nature of this image, I was able to set up this shot entirely inside. I set up one of my BoxDrop backdrops (it’s actually my master sunrise drop you can purchase through BoxDrops) and got my camera prepped on my tripod. I also set up my light off to camera right to give it that pop or burst of light to tie in with that feeling of rage. I took maybe five different shots of this pose just in case, but I knew what I was going for so it didn’t take long. And then I got my one clean shot of the backdrop too for later.

And that was essentially it for the photo shoot. From there it was all photoshop. I extended the backdrop, changed the color of my clothes, darkened things down, added a color tone, and added some smoke. So funny tidbit – I knew I wanted to be wearing red for this image… it’s a color I often associated with anger – that idea of heat and smoke felt like it went well with red. But… I don’t own a single piece of red clothing. So – I wore the top and pants I liked for the image and then changed them in photoshop. It was a little difficult to get it to change correctly around my hair but I’m happy with the results

Here’s a little peek at my process:

Here’s a quick little animation of each layer as it was built

And the Final Image:

All in all, I’m really happy with how this one turned out! I’m looking forward to working on the next one in this series and seeing what unfolds as I go! I’d love to hear from you! What do you think about these fine art pieces?