The Concept
Like many, I've found myself becoming increasingly agitated on a day-to-day basis with the unfortunate (to say the least) position we are in as a nation at the moment.
We've become detached from anything we once perceived as normality for coming up to a year now. Separation from the things we once enjoyed the most: socialising, travelling, freedom etc is the new normality for us.
Living to work rather than working to live, spending every breathing minute - work or play, inside the same 4 walls can cause you to dissociate and lose touch with yourself and the world around you. Those things you've built your life around and loved so much unexpectedly slip from your reach, and you're left questioning everything as a whole.
As we carry on, our hope shrivels and it seems like those things are just distant memories, rather than attainable goals/plans we hold for the future. Everything has come to a standstill, and it's ultimately out of our control.
In this piece, I wanted to reflect the odd feeling that these circumstances bring. Almost as if you're a mutation of your former self, floating in some kind of alternate universe. You're still you - but just passing by your life, rather than actually in living it.
Execution
For this visual, I used a combination of my scanner and a shit tonne of Photoshop.
Instead of using a print, I put my hand directly onto the scanner and weaved/manoeuvred it whilst it was being captured. This created the wavy, distorted effect on the fingers. You can see the original scan before any editing below.
This was pretty easy and fun to play around with, however a scanner isn't a necessity. You could re-create this effect or something similar with the liquify/distortion tools in Photoshop.
I also wrote on some plain paper and scanned this. However again, if you don't have a scanner you can always do this on your phone:
Simply write on a plain piece of paper with black marker/sharpie, take a photo of the sheet in as good lighting as you can, edit it and whack the contrast and whites up until the lines are defined. Then, import it into your software and remove your background. Easy!
Once all the scanned elements were in, it was mainly a case of messing around with different colour and texture combinations until I had something I was satisfied with.
I wanted to ensure that the image had a lot of depth, without looking too chaotic and distracting from the main elements. I sometimes find it hard to get this balance correct, but think I done okay in the end.
For the colour element I used gradient maps. Texture wise, I used film grain on the background, the patchwork filter on my hand, and a photocopy overlay on the whole image which I then played around with the blending options.
For the waved outline effect, I took major inspo from POLYGON (Instagram:polygon1993) who I have to give creds to. Their work is amazing, would definitely recommend checking it out!
Now, there is definitely an easier and more accurate way of doing this. However, I thought it would be easier not to learn and just do it my own way (classic). My method was to copy the hand layer, do a black overlay and add a stroke on the outside, which creates the outline. I then just copied and pasted this, adjusting it each time.
Please Note: This element of the photo is by no means perfect, and is definitely not my expertise. So if you're looking into creating this type of effect, I'd recommend doing some research rather than copying my bodged way!
And that's pretty much it. After some final tweaking, "I'm Losing Myself" was created :)
Thank you to all who have read this far, and I am sending massive love to everyone at this extremely hard time. My messages are always open for anyone who is struggling and needs someone to lend an ear. I'll also leave a link below with a list of UK Mental Health Charities for anyone who may need them:
Chloe x
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