Though I didn't have my camera with me in school that day, I decided to just use my iPhone's camera instead, which worked out just as well for this small project. I asked my friend Shan if she could be my subject or the human portraits, seeing as we were doing some work during lunch time she was the only one in the room with me at the time, so I didn't have a chance to ask anyone else to be my subjects as well. I pulled down the white backdrop and used one of the Portalite elinchrom lights with a soft box in front of my subject to improve the quality of my image a bit.
Here are the portraits I took:
And here are the images I used for the superimposing:
I carefully chose these photos because their heads were facing the same direction as my friend in her portraits, which would result in a more convincing image than if the profiles didn't match. When it came to editing the pieces, I repeated the same process for all of them. What I did was using the selection tool in Photoshop, I selected just the head of my animals. I cut and paste it onto a new layer and deleted the original background, leaving me with just a head on a transparent layer. Now because my camera took the animal portraits, the photographs are significantly larger than those taken on my phone. I opened up the human portrait I wanted to correspond with the animal one (for instance I used the blackbird head on the photo of my friend looking to the left, so it matched with the bird's profile), and pasted the head layer onto the human portrait. I then used the resizing tool and manually resized it to match with the face of my friend. Another thing I decided to do was lower the opacity of the head layer, so my friend's face still shows through a little bit. I didn't want it to be a 50/50 kind of thing, I wanted my animal portrait to be far more prominent than my human face, because I felt it created a strong image. What I didn't want was for my friend to be more prominent than the animal as I felt it defeated the purpose of anonymity.
I only had one slight problem when it came to editing one of my pieces, and that was that I didn't leave myself enough space on one of the portraits of Shan to fit in the whole of the blackbird's face. This however was very easy to resolve. I opened the image of Shan in Photoshop, and selected the left side of the background (without including any of her), I then opened a new window in Photoshop and resized the canvas so I could past the selection next to the image, expanding the left side a little.
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| Original |
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| Edit |
As you can see I was then left with an obvious line down the left side. This was yet again very easily fixed in Photoshop using the smudge tool, leaving me with this result:
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| Edit, Smudged |
Caron's influence is very obvious in my work. I have used her technique of blending an animal with a human for some portraits of my own. I was intending only on using her techniques as practice and development toward my final piece, and it has built my confidence up and has given me a few ideas to carry through for my final piece.
The only thing I found tricky was getting the animal features to match flawlessly with the face of my human subject. I think it would have been easier to paint on the animal features as I could have used my imagination and skill to create the animal portrait rather than have to use a picture of one I took beforehand and hope that its face matched that of my friend's perfectly. Though having said that, I don't believe my edits turned out that badly, despite being worried the faces wouldn't match seamlessly.
Here are my edits:
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