After the research from the New Scientist I decided to indulge myself in some character design that had been burning through my patience to get done. Although an obvious response to an alter ego I feel that overlaying a photograph with a characterised alter-ego is a light-hearted and artistically efficient way of working.
Click on the image to make it larger and you will see a gallery of 4 friends, where I have taken their nicknames or hobbies and turned them into a characature over the top of their photographed body. For example there is James, a man obsessed with comics and graphic novels, a hobby that lends itself well to my theory as the protagonist stereotypically lives out a double life as a normal human being and a superhero. So James was easy, linking his normal body with a distinctive Spiderman mask works quite well, and by keeping features such as the hair and glasses similiar lets the brain register who the person is.
That is another interesting part to this experiment, taking the the words said by both the BBC and New Scientist posted earlier it is interesting to see how the brain works and can register someone through certain features, because even if I were to take the body away, the glasses and hair would probably mean that his friends would be able to distinguish who it was, add their knowledge of his hobbies and the mask would confirm the judgement to be correct.
The image of Mike works well in this respect, taking the image of his clothes and you probably wouldn't be able to tell who it is, but once the iconic Mikey hair is added all of his friends will know who it is. Add this to the fact that he is labelled as the old man of the group and the stance and composition come into effect to confirm that judgement that this old man is a version of Mike, if not a little extreme.
It seems that once this split second judgement is made the smaller things don't matter; for both Eric and Mikey the colour of their skin is seen as a stylistic choice by myself rather than a reflection of their true self, and doesn't alter the brains recognition of the individual.
It is a style that I lifted from an article found in a copy of Vice Magazine, and after some research I found the artist; Jiro Bevis. His site is pretty good, hand drawn illustration coloured in digitally in Photoshop always looks good and his portfolio boasts some strong collaborations.
I really like the simplicity of the images, and the degradation of the images once I had scanned them in to my computer was interesting - perhaps scanning or photocopying my future images could provide and interesting effect to the appearance of my work. The images are simple yet effective, and the style is definitely one that I will try to continue, if not in this project then for other personal work. The style takes me back to work that I did for the AIB library for an awareness campaign for their E-resources:
No comments:
Post a Comment