Concept Idea No. 1

Looking Through the Window (Climbing The Waves)

This is a personal response to the three aspects which I chose. I took a scene from the movie where Jack Skellington (the protagonist of the movie) is climbing the movie’s iconic swirly hill (seen in y last blog) and set that picture as the background of my development.  Next I took ‘The Great Wave’ and inverted it horizontally to get roughly the same shape of the hill in the movie. I digitally copied the inverted wave 5 times to completely cover the foreground of the hill and the cemetery on the movie still. I then placed these five copies as best I could to cover the foreground and still let it look natural.

I blended the ends of each layer together to make it look more whole rather than placed and pieced together. I would have liked to cut out the boats on the wave however when I tried that the wave didn’t look as natural and menacing as it had before. I was very pleased with the final result of this step and would have liked for it to be the very end result, however seeing as I still needed to incorporate design into the piece I took one final step. I took a copy of Piet Mondrian’s ‘Composition II in Red, Blue and Yellow’ and placed it foremost on the picture so that it completely covered the picture of the man climbing the waves. I turned on the Overlay option for this layer and played with the opacity until I was happy with the final look. I did this to make it look like a Chinese screen window with a light in front of it therefore making it more see-through than a screen would usually be. (This aspect was inspired from a scene from the movie Mulan after having watched it last week).

I could have decided to say it was stained glass however I decided to keep the aspect of oriental culture (woodblock printing as very popular in Japan and the great wave is made using this technique) and say that it was a Chinese coloured screen window instead. Even though it wasn’t my first choice for the finished piece I am quite pleased with the end result – had I not needed to incorporate all three areas I would have left out the De Stijl composition and let it be just a man walking on a monstrous wave rather than the same thing being seen through a window.

Although I know this will definitely not be my final concept – I feel that I’m on the right track when it comes to combining the three elements.

References:

These are the pictures I used to create my final piece:

Hokusai, K. (1829) The Great Wave off Kanagawa. [image online] Available at: http://www.wallsoc.com/images/2000x1379/2012/09/01/paintings-waves-japanese-boats-vehicles-the-great-wave-off-kanagawa-katsushika-hokusai-thirty-six-views-of-mount-fuji-620740.jpg  [Accessed: 15th December 2012].

Mondrian, P. (1930) Composition II in Red, Blue and Yellow. [image online] Available at: http://www.pasunautre.com/2010/12/22/de-stijl-here-neoplasticism-and-the-20th-century/  [Accessed: 15th December 2012].