Manipulated Narrative Process

   I genuinely enjoyed myself as I worked on this manipulated narrative project. After listening to a podcast featuring artist Austyn Weiner, I was very much intrigued by the idea of painting over a photograph. Weiner's work is a beautiful product of her interest in fashion photography and her painting background. My last series of photographs was meant to draw from and harken back to the emotion and aesthetic of the sketches in my sketchbook, so I was very curious to see how transforming a portrait into one of these drawings would turn out. Could I create a caricature of someone based on how I would draw a portrait and somehow simultaneously create a cohesive fantasy?

   To create my manipulated narrative, I went searching through old sketchbooks for material to bring into my portrait image. I also created a few new drawings that had the portrait image in mind in order to really get the details correct. After scanning all of the traditional art, I cut out specific features of the drawings (eyes, nose, lips, etc) and positioned them over my portrait. A significant amount of warping and scaling was required in order to match the portrait and the way that the face was posed in the original. The rest of the editing process was a matter of masking and using layer blending options in order to bring the two realities together as seamlessly as possible. Although I am fairly happy with the end result, this a project that I feel like I could work on forever. At one point, I just had to say that it was finished and leave it at that. When someone looks at this image, I hope that they feel a sense of macabre and ugliness while simultaneously seeing a tragic beauty and hypnotizing quality to the photograph.