Multiple Source Composites

This exercise was to create an image from a variety of sources (our own photographs, scanned objects, and images we found online). It was a gas and of course I couldn't stop with one.

In my first image I bought into the idea of a narrative, or 'theme', and this is what I came up with:


The 'story' being illustrated here is this:
From one perspective the universe is blessed, and we are all held in loving hands. But because we are limited by our own screens of perception, there will always be gaps in what we can see of reality.

In this second image, which came to me in bits and pieces in dreams and daydreams, I gave up the idea of narrative and just went with intuitive sensation:


It's a little silly, and doesn't make literal sense (that fish would be pretty smelly in a real bouquet), but I had fun playing with it. I could have kept on 'tweaking' for quite a while, looking for a better balance of composition and color, but time was short and I finally decided it was 'good enough' as is.

I think there is some association between fish and flowers in France... some holiday, or famous saying... I remember seeing old turn-of-the-century postcards with that theme in French flea markets and the image stuck with me as a wonderful surreal pairing.

Both images look better smaller than they do printed out full size (which is 11x14), and the prints suffer a bit from the fact that I created them on a screen smaller than the actual print size. I didn't zoom in and work on details very much and because of that negligence the prints show up looking a little rough in places.

But one learns something new every day in this class :-) and my next attempts will be better.