The Secret Language of Comics

Tag: combophoto

When it Rains…

Student Posts
Rain cloud photo and confetti photo

For my combophoto I choose to make it look like it was raining confetti. I used a cloud photo and a picture of falling confetti and edited them to make it look like the clouds were raining heart shaped confetti. When I was trying to make my combophoto it was difficult to find the pictures I wanted at the right angles. Due to my limited knowledge of photo editing I needed to find pictures that required less complex editing processes. I got to manipulate different photos to make an image I wanted and got to learn more about photo editing through this assignment.

Sketch 4: Combophoto

Duskaboom!

Student Posts
Background sky photo taken by me. Ometepe Volcano photo from Flickr.

This Sunday sketch was a bit challenging but I enjoyed it! The examples provided through the instructions were very cool and instantly reminded me of a forced perspective assignment I once had in my high school photography class. I find forced perspective photography much more difficult compared to this assignment though because I have to find actual items I can physically work with, which can limit my ideas. On the other hand, I have the entire internet and CC licensed images to work with for this assignment—the slightly challenging part is just deciding what photos to use and how. I remember, for that forced perspectives photography assignment, I had used a small teapot, held it out, and aligned it with a light cloud on the sky so it looked like steam coming out from it. Initally, I wanted to recreate that, but this time “digitally” using photos from Flickr—I found the prettiest teapots—but I could not find an appropriate cloud photo, so I started going through my own camera roll of endless sky photos. As I scrolled through, I found some sunset photos I took last semester while I was on campus, and then a new idea hit me. When I showed my mom those photos a few months back, she had mentioned how the clouds looked like some sort of explosion, so I decided to switch up my idea—just a bit, still on the topic of some sort of steam coming out from something—and looked for volcano photos on Flickr. I was not finding any that I thought were good, until I came across this one of the Ometepe Volcano in Nicaragua, and I just knew it was perfect.

I used Picsart to crop the volcano and put it over my photo; I also darkened the silhouettes in my photo. Then I used Polarr to add a filter on the image.

Sketch 4: Combophoto

Sketches

Due: 9/29

Tag: sk4

Stephen Mcmennamy is an Atlanta artist and Creative Director at the advertising firm BBDO. He first came to my attention when I saw his series of “combophotos” that splice together two different images to form a surreal new creation.

Here are a few examples from him:

cauliflower + poodle

paintbrush + spaghetti

bridge + guitar

Take a few moments to look through the images he’s posted on his site linked above or on his Tumblr or his Instagram. Then create your own square combophoto and publish it to your site. You can take your own photos, but probably you’ll want to use CC_licensed images you find on Flickr — make sure you give credit to the originals that you modify to create your combophoto.

The level of technical aptitude for this assignment is actually relatively small, just simple cropping and resizing. The greater part of the challenge is thinking creatively and finding images that you can work with. That said, note that Mcmennamy comes up with ideas and then specifically stages photos to combine, and he seems to often spend significant amounts of time shooting and selecting his images. You won’t have lots of time, models you can hire, or expensive photo equipment to work with, so I don’t necessarily expect your final images to be as polished and perfectly aligned as his are. More important is for you to be playful and come up with images that combine to create something funny or witty or striking.

To edit the two photos together, you can use whatever photo editing software you’d like. Pixlr is a good free web app, as is PicMonkey. Adobe Photoshop is also available for you to use on the computers in the Media Library on the 4th floor of the Woodruff Library.

Once you have your image, publish it in a post on your class site. Don’t forget to give it a funny or witty title! Tag your post “sk4“

Write a paragraph about how you went about choosing the two images you combined and why. What challenges did you face as you created your combophoto? What do you think your final image conveys?

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