My Artist Statement

When I see other photographer’s works of art, the inspiration and ideas start pouring in my head. Then, when I get the chance to take that little inspiration and morph it into an art of my own, the feeling I get when I see the finished project is a constant reminder on why I do what I do, why I am a photographer. From when I was a young child I was always taking pictures. So many of my vacations were seen behind the small lens of a disposable camera, and in time I have become the photographer I am now. I started out wanting to be a landscape photographer, as I grew older it became a portrait photographer, and finally my dream is to simply become a photographer. This means that as much as I love portrait and fashion photography, I would love even more to experience all types. So, my goal now is to work for a magazine, so that I can take fashion pictures, as well as pictures of food, and landscape. I get the whole package.

For my projects, most of my finished products must go through a metamorphosis before they are finished. A lot like a caterpillar’s journey to become a butterfly. It all starts with an inspiration (the caterpillar), most of the time it’s from other photographers work, and sometimes it’s from my own thoughts and feelings. After I have received inspiration, I store it in a little folder in my brain until a project for school or a prompt come to my head that will work with one of the many inspirations, like when that “caterpillar” figures out that it needs to eat in order to grow. Next, the caterpillar eats and eats until it’s full, in other words I brainstorm. I brainstorm while I drive, or while I’m in the shower, or while I’m lying in bed. Hundreds of different ways to create my own and original piece based off of my inspiration. This step may take the longest, because I will think and think until the perfect vision comes to me. Its all down hill from here, my caterpillar has built itself a cocoon and now all it needs to do is go through the simple steps to become a butterfly. These steps for me are the building of this awesome vision. I gather materials, and set up my studio. I try to decide what would be the best lighting and where it should go. The last piece, is finding the model or subject for my picture. After that, the parts are all together and now its show time. Taking pictures may take forever, because I will not stop until I feel like I have had at least 4 fantastic shots. Just like the caterpillar won’t come out until it has become the perfect size and structure. My favorite steps come last. I take those fantastic shots, and choose the one that is closest to perfection and then I work my magic on photoshop to bring it closer to perfection. Finally, the picture is finished and that first look at the photo on nice paper is like when a caterpillar takes its first breath as a whole and beautiful butterfly. It’s a beautiful metamorphosis.

I’ve come to find that a few pieces of mine reflect my feelings on society, normally the downfalls of our society. However, some of my pieces really portray my personality. I’m a fun, upbeat, but relatively steady and reasonable girl. Growing up as the youngest of six kids makes me relate to people who are older than me, rather than my fellow students. So sometimes I have a hard time choosing what audience I should make my picture for, the sensible college student, or the free willed adolescent. Despite that complication I have found that not only does my work reflect my personality and often time’s thoughts, but it also has a familiar type of creativity. Through time it’s come to my attention that everyone’s level and style of creativity is different, and many times I see the same ere of the artist’s style of creativity in every single one of their pieces, and I have seen it in mine. However, sometimes that similarity of creativity is too similar, and that seems to be a difficulty of mine, the ability to “step out of the box.” That ability to take risks is a learned ability, and I believe in time I will step farther and farther out of my “box” and I know those pieces will be some of my greatest pieces.

Social Commentary

I have had this awesome idea for teenage drug use for a long time, and finally I was able to use it! I may not be as passionate about it as I am about Abortion and other stuff but I just had to do it. I changed one of my pictures, so the second one isn't my favorite but I had to do it because the other one I chose didn't fit. I did end up changing the picture to one that fits better however I had to do even more work on it to make it look like it fit. This isn't my best work I've decided but I still enjoyed being able to do some of the ideas I've had in my head. The make up isn't good enough it looks too fake, but that comes from the fact that I had so little time with my "models." This whole thing is to show the girl who is dressed in white about resisting temptation. Notice how the girls start to literally climb on top of her. I chose to have her look away for the first photo because I wanted the attention to be first directed to the tempters rather than the tempted. For the rest of the photos had my tempted girl looking at the camera because I wanted to make it look like the observer felt like she was relying on them to save her. The way she looks at you with the deep eyes tells the observer that "this could happen to you," and "are you strong enough?"

The works:

I used that dark red leather chair because I liked the fact that it wasn't black and that it was red. To me this dark red gives a deeper creepiness then another color. I kept the picture very dark with a black background and dark lighting to emphasize the evil of drugs. The dress was easy, I chose white for the girl in the middle because she is pure, she is withstanding temptation and as long as she does she will remain pure. Then I had one girl wear the black, and that was mostly because of her skin and hair color. The black shirt makes her look more dead against her pale skin. The other girl is wearing purple because I didn't want a navy color, it would clash with the darkness, and I felt like purple can be a very dark color, more witchy. The cigarette is fake, which is pretty obvious as well as the smoke. The smoke came from the website http://www.brusheezy.com/ which is a great place to get free brushes for photoshop. For lighting I simply put both of my studio lights on one side. So the the main light was coming from one angle so there would be hard shadows to add to the effect. With one light I had to make sure that the models were mostly facing the lighting so that their faces were still lite up enough to see the make up. Finally as I said earlier the makeup is a disaster, I definitely need more bruise-like colors in there.

The Day I Finally Realized My Brother Loves Me

It was the summer when Jordan (my brother) had his best friend live with us (Taylor Polson). Taylor's family had moved to Washington and then decided to move back home, so Taylor came early because he couldn't stand it the most and lived with us. Everything started great, Taylor was really nice and a fine "brother" to live with. Me and Jordan were in the car waiting for something and I don't remember what for, we started fighting and I said something that I will regret for the rest of my life. I told my brother that I wished Taylor was my brother instead of him. He looked at me with such disgust and hurt and said, "I cant believe you just said that, we may fight but I would never wish you to stop being my sister." I have never felt so ashamed. Up until then I honestly thought my brother despised me, I learned my lesson the hard way. We may fight but he loves me and will be one of my best friends forever. Turns out a couple of weeks later I couldn't stand Taylor, and hated him, with a passion (I don't anymore). I became very grateful that Jordan was my brother, and noticed how great of a brother he is. Now he is gone for two years and I miss him so much, but I am so proud that my best friend is out doing good.

Stuck in Black and White

This was my first project, my Self Portrait. Planning this picture was fun because I wanted to express the way I felt in a teenage populated world called High School. I decided to have me surrounded in newspaper because I felt the newspaper represented the world the best, or at least the world I am stuck in. That "world" is the average High School life. Where every teenage girl is the same, with the same petty problems and concerns. Where everyone (at least most people) act the same, try to be the same, are the same. A "black and white" world. While I don't want to be the same, I like to have color in my life. I am not going to just blend in and let my personality be crushed, then reshaped and melded together again into the exact same clone as every girl. This is why I placed me in the center of the page, normally I understand that centered is not always good, however I liked the effect of almost a splatter of paint just thrown in the middle of the canvas, to really show that it is different than the rest of the piece.

I have orange on my face to represent my personality. Choosing a color that described me the best was hard. First, I knew that I was going to be a bright color because I am a happy, fun person. At first I thought yellow! But looking into it I found that yellow does represent bright and happy, however yellow also is very harsh color, and irritating. So then I thought maybe pink, but pink is a very adolescent color, and that is not the message I was trying to convey. Purple is my favorite color, but purple wasn't bright enough. Finally I came to orange, orange represents a good and cheery personality, while at the same time not overly bright, orange is also a "chill" color. Basically what I am trying to say is that orange is the relaxed yellow, it takes out the harshness.

The Works:

This was easy to set up, first I just got a newspaper and made a collage of it. Then I grabbed a bigger piece of newspaper and somehow (I still, to this day, don't know how I managed to work this out) worked it around my body to make a top that covered me but not the paint. Speaking of the paint, this is dry paint on my face. With my mom's help, we sprayed the areas I wanted paint with a squirt bottle and then, placing the paint in her hand, my mom blew the dry paint onto the areas, with a little tweaking here and there. I learned that paper does curl with a curling iron, that's what I did for the paper in my hair. As for the technicalities of the picture, I set up the light so that I had no shadow (two lights on either side of my face). I tried to also add a frontal light to even it out better but the light was way to harsh and caused a shadow in the background which I didn't want. Then I set up the "f-stop" and "the other setting that I cant remember the name of" on my camera for the right amount of light in the picture and placed in on a tripod. Then I just had my mom press the button. Eventually, I let my mom take the camera off of the tripod and work her own angles and such.

Finally the photo shopping. I am already very specific and hard on myself about my pictures, now you can imagine how hard I was on myself about a picture of ME! That's like a double whammy! Anyways, but I surprised myself with how well I did, and how much I liked my photo. So when it came to editing I didn't do that much. Simply, just a Levels to make more contrast and make it brighter as well as a Hugh/saturation set up, but I do that with every photo. Then I wanted to make my eyes stand out a bit. Doing this is easy with blue, or green eyes so brown may seem a little hard but its actually quite easy. Simply select both the iris' of the eye using you magnetic selection tool. Then your going to take the darken tool and darken the pupil area and darken the very edge around the iris so that it brings out the ringed effect that every eye has. Then your going to take the lighten tool and lighten the area's in between the two dark areas this creates a very attractive contrast. Sometimes with brown eyes after lightening them they look red, so you most likely will want to use Hugh/saturation on them to make them a slightly more brown color and make them brighter. Finally when your done you simply deselect and soften the edges with a blur tool just in case you can see where you selected the iris. And voila you have beautiful and bright brown eyes.

The rest of the photo shopping was easy, I added a layer and adjusted its opacity to about 20%, I used my drawing tool and drew "eyeliner" around the eye. I already had eyeliner on but this was to make it a smidgen darker, and I did the same with my eyelashes, I simply made another layer and lengthened my eyelashes by drawing over them with the drawing tool. For this picture I wanted the expression to stand out in my eyes, so adding this little effect with my eyeliner and eyelashes draws more attention to my eyes. To finish it off I cropped it and added that dark circle around the edges for a more professional/finished look.

All in all, it was a fun picture to take and a fun project. I must give props, by the way, to America's Next Top Model for the idea of dry paint on the face! :)