One of my goals for this year is to create at least one fine art piece per month. I felt like this was very manageable goal even for the busy months of the year. But I found myself feeling uninspired. Most of my creations stem from a momentary visual in my mind that I feel this compulsive need to create. And even though I have a notebook full of ideas… I seemed to lack the motivation to work on them this past month. Luckily, inspiration finally hit and I got to work on my latest piece in this self portrait series.

As you may recall, this self portrait series deals with emotions or traits like hope, strength, growth, sorrow, anger, etc… The idea was born from the work of my favorite fine art photographers, Brooke Shaden. You can see all of my previous Fine Art work on the journal here.

The idea for this particular piece popped into my head one night… I’m not sure what spawned it to be honest. I can tell you that in high school – I was invisible… so much so that I got sat on a couple times. I guess I felt like a wallflower – someone who easily vanished into the background. Easy to overlook, easy to forget. Whether you want to be invisible or you just feel that way – I’m sure there are many who can relate to the idea of being (or feeling) invisible to those around you. I wanted to create an image that felt like I was being absorbed into the wall behind me… that I was becoming as invisible as I sometimes feel.

For this particular shoot, I knew I wanted a textured but hard backdrop – so I opted for our concrete walls and floors in the basement. I also liked that with the limited light down there – I have full control of the look and feel of the image. I also decided this time to set up my iphone and get some footage of me shooting – that way I could share it with you here and on my YouTube channel. So there’s a fun little video near the bottom of this post with the behind the scenes for the creation of this image.

I’ll be honest – this one was tricky! I wasn’t entirely sure how I was going to do it. I knew how I wanted my body to be positioned so I took a bunch of images, trying to get each arm, hand, foot, and my head in the positions I thought I wanted them in. And of course, I made sure to get one image of the blank wall. Here are the six images I worked with for the creation of this piece:

From there it was a lot of photoshop… blending pieces, getting them to lay correctly, giving shape to the concrete wall by adding shadow and highlights, blending the flesh of my hand and foot into the color of the wall. This was probably one of the more difficult ones I put together. And while it doesn’t look exactly as I pictured it in my head – it is pretty darn close… so that makes me happy.

Here’s the peek at the video I made of the creation of this piece

And the finished piece…

I hope you enjoyed this little peek behind the scenes of my latest personal project creation. I had a lot of fun playing around with this idea and trying to mold it into what I envisioned in my mind. Stay tuned for next month’s creative piece 🙂