See me in my works
Vanitas
A Photograph Two Ways -- Diptych Design
Click each picture from above to view a larger version of them.
Inspiration
My inspiration is an aesthetic style called vanitas, which conveys the transience of life, the fleeting beauty and the certain death. Vanitas always contrasts symbols of wealth and symbols of ephemerality and death. Skeleton, flowers, fruits are typical elemetns in a vanitas work.
Concept
Part 1
The part 1 shows the moment before the withering of the rose. The main object of this picture is the red rose putting on the green grass. The color red and green are complementary colors. The great contrast between red and green emphasizes the vivid color, also the vigor and the prosperity of the plant.
However, in the foreground, I put a falling leaf, which is a symbol of the coming of senility and death. The big aperture makes audiences hard to see the details of the leaf; instead, they could only see a yellow blurry shadow. It seems to convey that aging is certain but hard to detect. After the blooming and shinning of the flower, the ending is certain: the death.
Part 2
Part 2 shows the suffering and struggle when people are getting close to the final ending. This collage maintains two mini scenes.
The first scene is about the illness. On the left, people could see an old man opening his mouth widely, while there’s a hand holding a dried white rose. In this case, the dried white rose is the embodiment of a medicine, so the scene is about a people offer a medicine (the white rose) to the old man who are suffering from illness at the end of his life.
The second scene is on the right, which is about the nostalgia for the world. In this scene, the old man doesn’t have much facial expressions, but his left eye is crying – the falling rose petals are symbols of the tear. However, there’s another hand holding a surgical knife blade that cuts a rose (the symbol of eyeball) from the old man’s eyes. The falling of the rose becomes a bloody but romantic symbol that the man is closing his eyes – he left.
Communication between Part 1 and Part 2
The whole collage conveys the idea about the fleeting beauty and the certain death. Therefore, part 1 and 2 represents two different stages of one’s life. Part 1 shows the end of youth, while part 2 shows the coming of death. It just needs a really short moment for a flower to change from blooming to withering, which is a sadly cruel fact.
Due to the limit of the website, please click the above image to see the larger version.
Design Process - Part 1
There are both outdoors and indoors photos in the contact sheet, though I mainly choose photos I took outdoors.
I take my outdoors picture on the Gongqing National Forest Park (共青国家森林公园) located in the Yangpu District (杨浦区). I choose two background: one is full of falling leaves while the other one is full of green grass. I intentionally select these two backgrounds for different purposes, both of which contains the contrast between live and death. The background that is full of the falling leaves contrasts with the prosperity of the blooming rose. The background with the green grass, as I mention in the concept part, conveys the feeling of the coming of the death due to the falling leaves in the foreground.
There is only one picture shown in the contact sheet that is taken inside the doors, which is the last picture. The background of it is a black plastic bag, and some petals are intentionally taken off and thrown to the bag randomly by me. In this picture, I want to show the ending of the rose: no matter how beautiful you are when you are blooming, you cannot escape the definite ending that you will be abandoned, be thrown into a garbage bag. The following picture can see the setting when I take the picture. I use three light sources from different angles: my table lamp and two iPhones’ flashlight. My lamp can change the strongness of the light, also the tone of the light (it can provide both warm light and cold light). Therefore, I could switch the strongness, the tone, and the angle of the light easily with these three light sources.
Due to the limit of the website, please click the above image to see the larger version.
Design Process - Part 2
First, I design the background by changing its color and texture. I select the color I want to use in the palette, and then use the shortcut ctrl+shift+delete to change the background from white into my targeted color. Then, I insert a picture with paper texture above the background layer. By adjusting the opacity of the paper texture layer, it creates an effect of an old paper.
Then, I use the quick selection tool to select elements I want to use from photos. During the lecture, we learn several ways for selection, but I think quick selection tool is the most convenient in my project. That is because quick selection tool is useful when the outline of the targeted object is easily recognizable, also when there’s a great contrast between the background and the targeted object. Since my photos satisfy these two requirements, I use the quick selection tool. Nearly all elements other than the background are edited by the quick selection tool, including the head, rose, petals, leaves, and hands.
After that, I arrange these elements by putting them into different layers. For example, when I want to make the effect that one hand is holding the medicine (the white dried rose), I put the rose layer above the hand layer. Since there’re so many elements in this project, which generates too many layers, I use grouping as a method to manage them. I create five groups, including right hand, tear, head, left hand, and leave. Notice that the sequence of the group also represents the sequence of the layers. For instance, the tear group should be put above the head group, so that people could see the rose and petal tears on the old man’s face.
The last two tears use the clipping mask, which is a challenge I face when I make this work. In this case, I want to achieve the effect that the falling rose petals integrate with the falling leaves in the background. I refer to tutorial videos on YouTube and Bilibili.com, and imitate steps to achieve the effect I want. The following are steps: first I open the petal in a new window, use the quick selection tool to select the outline of it, then I insert a picture of the falling leaves. Right click the mouse, select the clipping mask, then only the part of picture that covers the petal will be shown. I think by googling and watching tutorial videos, users could master many useful photoshop skills.
Conclusion
I think I can improve my work from two aspects.
First, the falling leaves in the background appears abruptly, and it might not convey many meanings to viewers. I think I should put some effects on those falling leaves to make them more softly, or appear in the scene more fluently.
Second, the main object – the old man’s head – is downloaded from the Internet. If I have more time, I think I could use the dried roses and the falling leaves to recreate a human figure instead of directly downloading a picture.
Reference
The figure of the old man’s head is downloaded from Pixabay.com. All photos from this website can be used without attribution requirement and also for commercial aim.
Here’s the link of the original photo:
https://pixabay.com/photos/art-antiquity-old-sculpture-3084157/