Diptych
Wendy Xu
Pumpkin Carriage
Concept
As a famous icon in the story Cinderella, the Pumpkin Carriage arouses the memory of their childhood and fairy tales of nearly all the viewers. In the virtual story, the pumpkin turns into a carriage magically helping Cinderella find her love and live a happy life. In the real world, people create toys and models to reappear the story. This provokes my thoughts about the arts and beauty in the real world. On one hand, when seeing beautiful things we tend to reserve and reproduce them by photography, painting, literature, sculptures, and other art forms. On the other hand, human beings also like to create real objects to remind and recreate the scenes and icons in the virtual world, relating to the characters and stories that we like as a way to reproduce beauty. This is exactly how we interact and communicate with the world.
Process
Image I
The most attractive point of my Image I is the setting of the image. I bring the toy Pumpkin Carriage to the real world, a normal flower bed that we can encounter nearly everywhere in the busy city every day. The setting reproduced a tiny version of the fairy tale. The color contrast between yellow and green creates a strong sense of nature. The embellishment of pearls not only adds changes to the composition but also conforms to the theme of fairy tales, echoing the diamonds on the pumpkin carriage. The main part of the picture is on the lower left side to make the composition harmonious.
However, the setting is too low for the camera to capture from a Head-up perspective. Therefore, it is hard to focus and adjust parameters. I need to adjust the composition, lighting, and focus based on the effect obtained in the previous photo which is much harder to take photos than that of a setting higher.
Image II
We are required to use the photos we take to create a collage. At first, I didn’t have any inspiration that could relate to the theme of Cinderella and fairy tales. Then, the professor suggests that I can cut the images I have into pieces and randomly find some interesting compositions of the images, and add several layers to convey my ideas through it.
Therefore, I come up with the concept of the virtual world and reality. I use a picture of a real forest to reproduce the scene in the fairy tale and create two pieces of them with one in daylight and another at night to indicate different manifestations of real life. The wheels are the ones that relate the two manifestations of the forest and the ones that relate the two images. Similar to Image I, the pearls in Image II played a very good embellishment role. The overall color tone also echoes the Image I.
Conclusion
Both I and the critics during the class critique agree that the concept of my diptych is interesting but hard to get the point. The PS brushes that I used to create the transition from reality and the painting are quite vague and the special effect of the flower in the upper-right corner to indicate that it is a painting is not as obvious as it should be. Also, the overuse of computer technology makes Image II looks less like a collage.
The content and concept that I would like to express by Image II should be strengthened. If I have more time, I would like to first work on the concept of the Pumpkin Carriage, leading a new understanding of the original story from a modern and adult perspective, which would be interesting and attractive. Besides, I would like each piece of the collage to have relations and interactions with another so that the whole collage looks like a whole.
Image of Diptych
Contact Sheet
Diptych
