First Assignment and Project Ideas

Here's our first mini assignment that we did last week. We were supposed to find a Current Events-type image and manipulate it in Photoshop so that it made a different impression than the original photo.

I found this image in MSNBC's Week in Pictures. It was taken for AP by Charles Rex Arbogast (what an excellent name). It's captioned, "I've seen that face before... Pedestrians stop to watch a live broadcase in downtown Chicago of impeached Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich delivering his closing argument at his impeachment trial in Springfield, Ill., on Thursday, Jan. 29. The state Senate voted unanimously to remove him from office."
Incidentally, Rod Blagojevich is a pretty excellent name too.

Knowing nothing whatsoever about this whole hullabaloo, I was simply charmed by moment captured in the photo. These four people are stopped dead in their tracks to see what unfolds on that huge screen. Speaking of which, huge screens never fail to baffle me. Aren't we already bombarded by billboards and TV screens as it is? Of course, I understand that this one is making the news available to everyone, but I can't help thinking about the commercials that are probably up next.
Anyway, my other motivation was that this looked like a relatively easy Photoshop job - just replace what's on the screen. I wanted it to be something very opposite of what was there already - a totally different reason for people to be standing around in 24-degree weather. I thought about a scene from a movie or a cartoon, but I decided on this:


Now it's on to Real Project ideas. Our first Digital Printmaking piece has only a few guidelines. It's got to involve manipulation (of the viewer, by the artist, or a comment on manipulation in general), some kind of digital process, and a 3 color screen print (serigraph if you want to get fancy). But basically we just have to make art. I am not sure how I'm going to execute this whole thing. Elaine Bradford makes me want to incorporate crochet into my project, but I don't want to rip her off by making striped sweaters for inanimate objects. I'd like to manipulate a traditional art or craft and use it in an unexpected way. And though I'll never produce anything as magical as Jill Greenberg, I want to be able to change the viewer's impression of my subject in a similar way - making people aware of detail they may not have seen before or changing natural colors and textures.