Surrealist Photoshop Self Portrait Johnson
Prompt: In this project, you will learn the basics of photo manipulation as well as further exploring composition, elements, and principles of design. You will create a montage of images that communicates a message, opinion, thought, feeling, or narrative. The self-portrait project will be your first experience using Photoshop to create fine art. You will use a digital camera or phone to shoot a picture of yourself specifically for this project. You will also collect additional objects, photos, or images from the web. You will then fade those items in and out of the photo using a variety of Photoshop tools and techniques.
You will also need to use some text. You may use a quote, a passage from the Bible, handwritten notes and more. Be sure to look at the examples for good ways to integrate text. The text that you use should be fully integrated into the image. It should not function as a label sitting on the top of your artwork.
Your final piece should look very descriptive and very much explain who you are. You should not try to include pictures of everything you like. Instead, focus on portraying some sort of abstract idea. Think about how everything conveys that idea; everything from pictures to color choices and compositions affects the viewer’s response.
Brainstorming thoughts: From the beginning I wanted to incorporate a nature element and distort some of my features to achieve a surrealist dream like effect. I also wanted the piece to be abstract and kind of weird to show my outgoing personality. With this in mind I began sketching ideas.
Round 1 Sketches
Round 2 Sketches
Process
First I photoshopped myself into a picture of my eye. Then I removed my eyes and replaced them with eyes from another picture of me that is exactly the same except for my eyes are open in the picture. I did this so when I added the flowers they would look like they're growing out of my eyes. Then I added the water drop flowing out of my eyes. The next steps were just adding shadows, highlights and any other details to help the realistic aspect of the piece. The finally steps were trying different overlays and filters to give the piece a more dreamlike aesthetic. I like the bright warm colors of the original photos but I wanted a more dreamlike effect for this project. I think more purple and pink tones give a dreamlike surrealist vibe. I also played with different filters to make the outside of my eye as interesting as the inside but I decided against it. I want the inside of the eye to be where viewer's eyes are drawn to. After some final touchups I reached the final product.
Final Product
