Module 2 Sketches: Photomontage Concepts

Sorry for my terrible handwriting and drawing abilities ahead of time. It would look a lot better if I wasn't required to put so many sketches on each page. I have very bad, awful handwriting and pretty poor fine motor skills in general, and making things big is generally how I get around that. Let me know if it's completely illegible, and I'll type up a transliteration.

My first concept has to do with altering the Windows XP default background screen (Bliss by Charles O'Rear

) to reflect the current and future effects of climate change, with maybe some surreal and threatening overtones using Frank Frazetta's Death Dealer (

) and other such properties, darkening and muddying the colors, adding smoke and smokestacks and haze and whatnot. I really want to go for that de-familiarization of a familiar image thing. 

My second concept is in altering the photograph taken by Rachel Posner ("Death To Judah"

) to reflect our modern political climate. I had more difficulty with this one than I did with the windows screen, probably because it's a less neutral image, so it's harder to use it to say something new. I had a rough time figuring out what three of the many ideas I come back to routinely I should be using to look for pictures, and I had a lot of trouble finding famous images that didn't already have a bunch of edits up for view on google. I wish I'd been able to find a repository of randomly sorted famous images, but it was super difficult to find anything noteworthy but not played out without knowing exactly what I wanted ahead of time.

I had a really hard time trying to come up with an anti-Confederate symbol other than the black power fist. The popular abolitionist statue Greek Slave symbol was the best I could think of, aside from maybe a pair of shackles hanging from the window or something, which maybe I should've illustrated in hindsight, but the deed is done now.

This is a really new artform for me, I'm not used to building so heavily off the work of other visual artists/photographers. I've made fanworks before, but creating a fanwork implies a nod of fealty or inferiority to the original, and I'm used to writing and drawing, not copying and pasting. And in the past when I have done some collage work on the computer it's always been something I did without sketching, just started going as soon as I had all the pictures together that I wanted/needed. This is a learning experience to be sure.

I left a sketch in from a concept I'm thinking I'll probably abandon--the VJ Day Kiss (VJ Day, Times Square, New York

) overlaid with low opacity images of both Biden and Trump being creepy around women/girls and some text from the woman's testimony on the event, but I'll probably leave that be for now. Probably.

Finally, I wanted to liken Pence to Himmler by using footage both from Himmler's visit to concentration camps, and from Pence's visits to family detention centers--as well as Pence's visit to the actual Holocaust memorial in Dachau.