my surrealism project

       My message is that there is a boy who is being forced to do things he doesn’t want/getting peer-pressure. The reason one silhouette is black on a white backdrop, and one is white on a black backdrop is because the black backdrop represents a unpopular belief or way of acting, when the light backdrop represents a more “popular” trend of acting and behaving. The two silhouettes show two choices for the main “protagonist” in the middle, the two options that they are offering both have good and bad sides to them. The light silhouette is offering the protagonist happiness to be he but be socially “out-casted” and be considered “weird” or the dark silhouette tells the protagonist that he will be able to have popularity and social acceptance but he would have to change how he looks and acts.  The main protagonist is only seeing the shades of grey in each of the deals and is confused in what to choose.

I initially though of it a boy with the devil and angel on his shoulders or beside him, but I quickly scratched the idea and looked into other options. Some of the options consisted of pictures/sketches of two platforms with a boy on one and people on the other. I eventually looked back on the devil angel idea and started on it almost immediately. I started cutting out the wings and taking photos as fast as I could. This process took approximately two days then I had to take everything into Photoshop. At first I had a few troubles alternating the colors for the white silhouette because I was confused why the mask wouldn’t allow me to fill it in white but I just ended up selecting the silhouette and pressing the delete button and all those problems were solved. After that it was smooth sailing. And shortly after I finished I did this artist statement.

The technical skills I got from this were my Photoshop skills, initially I wasn’t good at Photoshop and I’m still not the best at it but I now don’t only know more but I know what I can improve on, it also showed me how to do silhouette photography which was very fun and educational. The conceptual thing I learned is that social anxiety isn’t just black and whit there is plenty of other ideas to think about and other point of views that can be put into thought. It also showed me that the there is more reasons for peer-pressure.