Week 3: A Vignette Composition

One of the things I’ve appreciated about taking Claudine Hellmuth’s online class is the opportunity to think about what I’m doing creativity. Most of the time I don’t analyze what I make as I go along, but when you gain some new tools (or refresh what you already know), it makes it easier to solve the problems that come up.

Perhaps this is an unromantic way to view making art, but I do believe that much of the process is about problem solving. Because you have a gut feeling you want things a certain way, it’s all about experimenting until you get things “right” …in other words, until you achieve something that allows you to move on.*

I played a lot with this composition in Photoshop. It’s the first time I’ve consciously tried to make a vignette (usually it just evolves), and I liked the challenge of having boundaries and trying to do as much as I could within them. Of course the beauty of Photoshop is that you can keep doing and undoing to your heart’s content, although I had promised myself that I would use some of my collage stash to do at least one of Claudine’s projects. Oh well, maybe next time…

*It’s not so much that you want things to look a certain way, you’re after a certain feeling which you might not understand until you actually start working on a piece—and then when you get it, you get it.