Photomanipulation
In my artistic journey I have jumped around from media to media, through styles, and found different influences. I have been drawn in by different visions, and although creating art hasn’t always been a constant in my life, there has always been a part of me wanting to capture the magic.
As someone who is drawn to technology and has always been fascinated with the things that digital artists could do, this felt like a natural place for me to experiment. With no knowledge of what I was doing but knowing what I wanted to achieve I downloaded a hooky copy of illustrator and set about teaching myself how to make vector images. I have lost the raw files long ago, but the below is one of the pictures that I created and still hangs on a bedroom wall today.
My involvement with creating art went through fits and starts over the years and following the creation of some bedroom wall art for my kids, I struggled with vector art. The steep learning curve and the slow rate of improvement dampened my joy of using it. However, I had now scratched an itch and I still had that need to create so I shifted from one adobe app to another, Photoshop became my new friend.
I was fascinated with the abstract imagery that was becoming popular at the time. Drawn to the photorealistic absurdities and matt paintings that skilled hands were creating. Unfortunately, I don’t remember the artist, but I remember reading an article about a popular artist of the time who was creating these fantastic dream-like images, and I thought, “I want to do that”.
At this time, I already had a subscription to the basic photography package and was already using photoshop as part of my photography hobby, so it will be easy right, to learn how to do this, 5 minutes and I will be an expert!
Well, it wasn’t quite that quick, and I would in no way say that I ever became an expert, but over time I slowly taught myself how to make half decent photomanipulation artwork.
It’s really here that the itch to create art became a fire and I found myself starting to create on regular basis. Even though my influences were pretty random around this time, there were underlying themes coming through that still shape my art now. I felt myself drawn towards telling stories focused on the human condition with a dark humour underlying many of the images. Not all images were like this, but it really started to come through as I continued to create.
Unfortunately, now that I create art more through drawing and painting, I don’t really spend any time doing photomanipulations anymore. Many would also argue that the advent of AI has mostly killed this type of art as you can now create photorealistic images which the typing of a few words.
Below are some examples of what I created over the years. I hope you enjoy looking at them as much as I enjoyed creating them:
