Woohoo! Another fine art piece for you all today! This progress makes me so happy! I’ve mentioned before that one of my goals for this year is to create at least one fine art piece per month. This feels like an attainable goal for the year and it should help me “finish” the series by the end of the year if I stick with it.

If you’ve been following this series for a bit, you’ll probably know that this self portrait series deals with emotions or fragments of a person. The various parts that make up the whole individual. So far I’ve shared pieces like hope, strength, growth, sorrow, anger, etc… If you missed them and you’re interested, you can check out all of my previous Fine Art work on the journal here.

This image was one of those spontaneous ideas. I had an initial idea in my head but I wasn’t sure how to properly execute it. So this image started with a base idea and then improvisation shifted it into something different. And different isn’t bad… And in this case – it definitely wasn’t bad 😉

For this shoot, I knew exactly what I wanted my backdrop to be. So I trudged through the snow to the the conservation area just down the road from my house, set up my tripod and started working. I didn’t have an actual blue cloak, but I did have a green bed sheet – so that’s what I used for this image. This image does have a little composite work. That blowing cloak is actually comprised of three pieces, the base image and then two other pieces of the sheet overlaid on top. From there I played around with the color of it and added some tones to the image to give it the feel I was hoping for.

Below is the video showing a little peek at the creation of this piece. And you’ll notice that for a good portion of this image, the cloak was red. I wasn’t sure from the outset what color I wanted it to be. But as I was working on the image and thinking about what the meaning of it for me was – I realized that the red cloak wasn’t really the right fit. Because for me this image is more about a sense of calm or relief. That big inhale you take after making it through some difficult day, week, month, year. And I felt like that breath, that inhale, it wouldn’t be red. It would be blue… It should reflect the cold, brisk air. So the color changed at the very last second.

This video has another voice over… and so I share some more of my thoughts about the significance behind this image as it unfolded even after I created it. The book I reference in this video is called, “I Cry in the Shower: Loving Silas Living with Cancer” by Gloria Martin. I highly recommend her book and I’ll be sharing my personal thoughts and feelings about it with you in an upcoming post.

And here is the finished art, dedicated to my dear friend, Gloria!