Collaborators: My digital imaging teacher, Gabriel Mejia and my digital imaging class gave me feedback before I submitted it for my digital imaging class.
Teacher Name: Gabriel Mejia
Grade: 12
Dimensions: 8 x 10 inches
Description: This is my surreal landscape. Only the tree branches growing on the side of my face cheek are from unsplash.com. All images from unsplash.com are royalty free. All other images here are taken my me: my face, the Chicago skyline, hills from California, the golden gate bridge. They are all put together by photoshop to create my surreal landscape.
Artist Statement: The colors red & blue are the most prominent because those are my favorite colors & so I wanted them to pop out the most, so the color white helped with that. You see the roses in the red water. The side of my face enlarged in the background smoking some clouds with my faces in that cloud I’m smoking. The tree branches are growing on my face. Also, the white gave it that cold & winter vibe to it, so it goes along with me smoking the clouds. My face is also faded in the top right corner of the sky looking down with my hair tangling. There is the Chicago skyline on top of the blue hills. I wanted the hills to look like water & give it that atmospheric perspective with the shades of clouds behind the skyline. My intended leading lines were the roses in the red water, the white trail & the Golden Gate Bridge leading viewers to my enlarged face with all the detail around it. I used a lot of manipulation in the opacity, image color adjustments like contrast, color balance, black & white, the eraser tool, magic wand & the order of the labels & folders with my layers were important. I used the eraser in the clouds & the sky a lot. Believe or not, the sky & the cloud took me the most time to put together. The only photo from Unsplash.com were the tree branches because I found it really tedious & frustrating using the magic wand & eraser to crop out the tree branches I took. All other images were taken by me from my camera roll: my face, my roses, the Chicago skyline, the hills from California, & the Golden Gate Bridge.
Other than being an End of Evangelion reference with my enlarged side of my face floating, I wanted my artwork to represent pain. I thought the idea of pain was enough material to go along with to be a surreal landscape. So I used beauty & nature to juxtapose this idea of pain. It’s kinda graphic, but I wanted the red water to look like blood being juxtaposed with the roses. I wanted to use roses somewhere in my art because my Mom’s name is Rosemarie & she loves roses, so I had to include red roses somewhere in this project. The tree branches on my face were supposed to look like veins & a reference to the Spider-man Venom symbiote taking over me. I wanted myself to look like I am drowning, but couldn’t make it look right, so that’s the water in the Chicago skyline sinking in the water looking hills I put there instead. The water looking hills are hills taken by me in California photoshopped to look like water. It goes hand in hand with my face sinking down or drowning. My goal was to make my artwork look beautiful is what I’m hoping viewers will see and how it contrast beautifully with the elements of pain.
Español de México 
English