David Hockney
DAVID HOCKENY was born July 9th 1937 in Bradford, England. He was a painter, photographer, stage designer, print maker and draftsman. David was a big contributor to the pop art movement in 1960, therefore in England he is a well known influencer of the 20th century. David had always been interested in art and the people who he admired were people such as Picasso, Fragonard and Matisse which is why later on he attended art school in London and and then moved to Los Angeles, where he started painting and creating photographic collages which he called joiners, joiner photography is the fusion between both photos and collages and you take 2 or more images and you seperate them to create a larger image where you then digitally merge them or overlap them where they will then resemble a collage. David used a polaroid camera (he used the beautiful composite of the SX-70) where he would capture different perspectives and then capture a collection of images into a cohesive body where he creates a visual reality or also know as cubism. David was a very creative person he was synesthetic which means he sees colors through music and the gift was said to be portrayed on the stage sets. Not only did David have a wide variety of hobbies and things he was good at, in 2010 he started creating his work on an Ipad where he learnt the magnificence of digital art and technology. Tate Britain is an art gallery in Millbank, London where David's work was admired by many and is said to be the most visited exhibition and there was said to be an upcoming sale of one of David's portraits Pool with two figures is said to get a colossal amount of money of about 80 million US dollars.
Photoshoot plan
Contact sheet (RAW images)
This photoshoot is a set of different landscapes, objects and people (some of me) that I thought would be interesting to do in David Hockney style. This first shoot is my first attempt of doing joiner photography. In my attempt of this I constructed a variety of different images of things that stood out on the streets or caught my eye. I highlighted the 16 images that have the best contrast and aren't blurry.
Process logs (1st shoot)
Process logs are a good way of analysing your work and to show others how you edit your images. To exemplify David Hockney's style of work, cubism ( also known as joiner photography ) you need to do quite a bit of different things on photoshop. Joiner photography is very time consuming but with the right motivation your developments will look very good. The first thing you want to do is edit your image to your satisfaction, I turned the brightness down and increased the contrast to make the clouds stand out more as well as the trees. To then finalize your ( now ) edited image, right click on your mouse pad and select the flatten image on the options list. This will merge your image into one.
The next step is you will want to select the rectangular marquee tool on the left hand side of the tools bar and you then drag a certain part of the image that you want. The best way to do this for me is choose a side of the image that you will go, meaning you start selecting boxes on the left hand side or the top of the image. I normally start from the left side down to the right side up and then I gradually start selecting parts of the image across. This image that is shown above was quite a hard image to edit, as you have to focus on the composition of the image and how big or small your going to produce it on the edited version.
After I edited my image, I went onto File and I pressed new which is at the top when you click file. This box will show up once you have done, make sure the preset is custom therefore you can then adjust the width and height of your canvas, I changed the resolution to 300 so the pixels are more visible when the images is pasted on the canvas. One you name the canvas to whatever suitable press okay and you will have your plain canvas.
Once you used the marquee tool that you drew with, you will then want to select the tool above that ( the one at the top ) the move tool, this will enable you to move the selected part of the image that beforehand you cut out with the rectangular marquee tool. One by one I then pressed ctrl and t which enabled me to increase or decrease the part of the image as well as moving it around the canvas where I wanted it to go. If I wanted to change a box on its on but I have 13 layers, a way to go about this is to hide all the layer ( use the eye icon on the right hand side of photoshop where it names all the layer ) and when you find the layer that you want to move just press ctrl and t. Gradually, your development will come about and your work will start to resemble David Hockney's i.e joiner photography.
Developments in the style of David Hockney - exploring composition and layering
These are the David Hockney developments that I created on photoshop. For a first attempt of doing this kind of work I think that it turned out quite successfully and I am proud of the work that I have produced. At first I really struggled with positioning the boxes and making them look like a whole image, but when I looked back at David's work I saw that his images weren't meant to look like it was actually an image, they looked weird and funky, certain objects were in the wrong place and not where they were supposed to be. I enjoyed doing this type of work and I think that it does constitute with me personally and my identity, this is because I admire things that most people don't and I feel the need to capture images all of the time of random things. The world is a big place, and some people don't get to see it all with they're own eyes therefore people take photos and others admire. Photos are not just still images of objects or landscapes or people. Every image has a story, sometimes it may be hidden, sometimes it may not. Photographs contain memories and that's why they're so wonderful. David Hockney's work portrays a picturesque sensation. His images resemble art but in an unusual way which makes it just as much more interesting.
To get the background colors for my developments, I copied and pasted an image that David Hockney created and I went onto photoshop and I used the eye dropper tool which enabled me to select the exact color from his image and then I selected the paint bucket tool which then covered the background in the exact color that I selected. A lot of David's joiners consist in a greyish background or more so light colors ( such as tan brown or pastel blue ). This style of work is also known as montage work. Where you collectively montage a singular image into tiny little pieces. Like a jigsaw puzzle.
Contact sheet II RAW
This photoshoot was shot in Ms. Burleys classroom, after school in intervention. I asked my friend to help me take some images, which is why her face is the main context of these sets of developments. I personally think this photoshoot was highly successful and the images turned out great. We used a big studio LED light which is what made the brightness and contrast of the images amazing. Not all of the images turned out how I wanted but most of them did.
The images were shot with a white background, and a studio light which makes the background protrude more. Then my friend pulled multiple different expressions to make my photoshoot all the more dramatic and pronounced. The angles were similar maybe for more further developments I could've experimented with different angles . I enjoyed this photoshoot as you can really notice the emotions in the face and the quality is outstanding, you can see every miniature detail. The images are potraits, which mean a photography that only depicts the face or head and shoulders. The drastic facial expressions also give great uniqueness to the set of developments that I produced.
RE-DRAFT developments - experimenting with faces and people
In these set of developments, I decided to try a new technique, where I experimented with different compositions, composure of color and face distortion. I think personally this photoshoot was very successful and turned out great. I used a different technique with editing this images, it was quite straight forward as I only used ctrl + c ( to copy the fragment of the image that I want ), ctrl + v ( to then paste that small fragment that I chose and this will then create a layer ), ctrl +t ( this then enables me to move around the fragment or enlarge it or change its colour ).
Further developments - experimenting with double exposure
I enjoyed making these further developments a lot. They look quite idiosyncratic and unfamiliar. Yet that's what make's it peculiar and different. In the first image that I further developed I used the same image and copy and pasted it and then I double exposed the image. With the other images I used the same techniques as I did with my re-draft developments but I decided to switch it up a bit as they are further developed images. I think something that I can improve on with further photography work, is figuring out different ways to experiment with an artists work, that will then enable me to portray more work and be able to show a different variety of skills that I may have regarding the pieces or type of work that I do. Whilst creating these developments I learnt quite a bit , such as ; being able to copy and paste an image with it being different colors to the background image, I also learnt new techniques to cutting out images into different pieces.