Brain Storming Assignment #1

Before I begin an assignment, I have to be inspired to start it. Maggie Taylor's unique artistic expression is what mainly interests me for this first assignment. She begins by collecting items at flea markets, garage sales and on E-bay. She particularly likes to collect photographs from the 19th century, especially tintypes and ambrotypes. In addition she collects old toys and objects — things that have a sense of history and presence. She prefers antique shows or flea markets to E-bay™ because she often doesn't know, until she holds an object in her hand, if it will work well for an image.

She scans her collected objects on a flat bed scanner — usually with the lid of the scanner open. Once they are scanned she starts constructing an image. Working intuitively, she approaches the image without preconceptions. Starting with one or two objects, or an old photograph, she usually has only a lose idea of how they might work together; but things change and start to come together when she's working in Photoshop, putting things together then taking them apart again, making as many as forty different layers in an image and sometimes more, watching how things interact with each other.

I intend to create a manufactured world by combining landscapes from multiple photos together. I aim in creating an artificial, digital person by putting faces together. If I make a child, I'll smooth out the skin completely and shrink the artificial person. I also aim in creating an animal with a human form as the example shown above. The photo in the end will be converted to black and white, and then I'll manually put in color to each component of the photograph under the soft light layer. This will create a painterly effect. If I can't find the appropriate attire, I will try to scan what I'm missing from magazines or old photos.