Monday 17 November 2008

Starting the First Assignment

I started to work toward the first assignment at the weekend as I felt I had probably worked out how to use the scanner well enough to embark on this. I began by thinking of lists of things that were personal to me including my interests and hobbies and things that have influenced my life.

2D Elements

The first thing that I decided to scan was playing cards. Cards have been a constant and ongoing interest. I am not a gambler but I've always played cards with my family and friends. My grandmother taught me to play rummy when I was about 4 or 5. As an only child playing patience was something I could do on my own and entertain myself for hours. Bridge became very important to me at university, and now I play Kalooki with my mother and aunt. I used different packs of cards to create images to scan and then I realised that the white background was not helping the image so I found something that resembled the traditional green baize of a card table to place behind the cards on the scanning bed; which I think is a great improvement. There are other ways to portray cards which I have not yet explored, but if I choose to use them in the final image I may decide to explore this further.

My next topic of interest is travel. We recently went to New York and I collected various pieces of travel memorabilia. I've been creating a book combining my photos and travel diary but have not yet completed this; however, I wanted to include some of the non-photographic bits and pieces in the book and this seems to be a way of incorporating some of these items in an interesting way. What I like about these scans is the colour. This is probably a happy accident but I did choose the items to scan and left some out too. I have lots of material from different holidays collected over many years, these could be incorporated into a final image.

Gardening has been another of my life-long interests and I have had an allotment for about 17 years indeed this is the subject of another blog. Seeds represent this interest and I have collections of seeds and seed packets. The choice of which packets to scan and how to arrange them was important. The random arrangement included a mixture of flowers and vegetables; the more regular arrangements were either of flowers or of vegetables. 3D has crept into the fourth scan as I included the seeds as well as the seed packet. There are many 3D items that could be included in the gardening theme and I could easily combine these into a 2D/3D composition.


I could scan other 2D images from my list of topics and may choose to work them up if they are to be included in the final image. The real problem is deciding on the subject matter for the final image and how to combine 2D and 3D images successfully. My problem is more knowing were to stop investigating and when to start making the final image. I could go on and on scanning things and each of these topics could be developed. The 3D scans I've made will be the subject of my next blog.

I would appreciate any input if anyone is reading this. Thanks

1 comment:

  1. I'm reading it and very interested in how you tackle and resolve the issue of what to choose. In my mind, deciding what to do takes most of the time. It might happen that as you work through your varied interests you will discover material for many themes in the future, which would be just fine! But a certain one will feel just right at this point.

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