Mitosis is the second finished work in a series of artworks centered around my axolotl ring. The idea came to me after I took a look at my contact sheet and homed in on the picture I wanted to use as a base for my project.
Contact Sheet
I didn’t really have any goal or idea in mind when I was taking photos for the contact sheet. It was only after I took them and received feedback on the shots that I decided on my idea.
The base photo is a shot that I took of my ring while working on a drawing project for the Foundations of Visual Art class (a fantastic class). I took a picture of it under a set of spotlights to get three shadows of the same object. The drawing that followed is called Metamorphosis, and is about how I am as adaptable as the creature on the ring.
Photoshop
My first attempts at using photoshop were miserable, as I didn’t know that photos needed to be rasterized before you could do anything to them. After that however, I was able to ply around with my idea. Expanding on the theme of my drawing, I had made a painting beforehand that depicted en evolution of the drawing in a sense, with a single white ring splitting into rings of different colors. This represents the different kinds of person I can become, with no real limit as to what I can be.
I overlapped the painting with the image I took for reference for the drawing and duplicated the shadows to create a circular visual. By resizing the individual colored rings, I was able to further augment the feeling of adaptability by creating a variety of shapes.
Mitosis
The name come from the biological term for replicating cells during growth, which is another main idea I wished to express.