where's my backpack?

Here's a goofy one. It kind of looks like a flag to me, but I probably just like it because it's weird. I made this for part of a photo assignment. 

The image is photo-copied pictures of young me,  that I then cut out of the background. I placed the paper images on top of photo paper, in the dark room, along with star stickers and exposed it to light. This may of working is sometimes called a Ray-o-graph, after Man Ray. He was an artist and photographer and he often worked in this way. 

If you notice the one picture of me I am wearing a large backpack, and in the many small images of me I have no backpack. The photo project told a story about my first day of school, when I left all my stuff on the bus, no one was there to meet me, and I basically was freaking out. Funny story. This image is supposed to represent when I realized I didn't have any of my stuff and I freaked out!

Without the story though, it just looks like something a kid would fly over their tree-house.  So that is why I like this one.

I'm Floating!

Here is an image from a wacky photo project of mine. In the others I am levitating a fork and spoons are stuck to me like a magnet. Here I show off my levitation skills. This photo is  silly, but so am I.

Scrap Photo Collage

Here is another piece that I made years ago. This collage was all done with scraps of photo paper that I had saved. I would use just small pieces of photo paper to check exposure times and stuff in the darkroom. It would save me lots of full sheets of paper, to use small scraps first before I made prints. 

So i saved all of my scraps from the darkroom. Then one day I sat down and put together this little composition. I like it because it is made of all my own images. Collage can be fun and anyone can do them. It is a good use for that pile of old magazines sitting around the house. Make your own next time you are bored on a rainy day.

Sandy Boxers

I've got boxers in my sand. This is a black and white photo that i took years ago right near Virginia Beach. The whole beach was pretty much bare. There weren't very many shells to be collected. It was January, so there was no swimmers out. The only thing to be found was a pair of stripped boxers half buried in the sand. I had to shoot a photo of it.

I printed the photo with high contrast using filters. This gave it a very surreal look. 

Negative Girl

When developing your own film, you end up with three or four inches of unexposed film. This extra film is trimmed off and discarded when cutting the negatives into useable strips of four or five. However for some reason I decided to save these scraps to use for messing around.

Here is one way that I used a scrap piece of film. I drew the image on the shiny side of the film with black ball point pen. I used an exacto knife to scratch in the design on the not shiny side of the film. This image was loaded into a color enlarger and printed onto color photo paper.

I made this years ago now, but I still really like the image. I think I did other drawings on film and did the same thing, but this one had the best result.

Orb!

Well, this is my new art blog. I made this one as a sister site to my metal art page. I will use it to show other artwork that I am working on, as well as to show some of my old stuff. I hope that you enjoy the images.

This is something I did years ago, when I was studying photography. I shot this with black and white film in my Cannon SLR. This is a reverse/negative image, made from a black and white print being used as the negative. I put the black and white print face down on color photo paper and exposed it that way. I have many different versions of this one in different colors.