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Line Drawings by Steve Natanson

Vogue is Beauty

            In creating my piece, I wanted to communicate a theme that would reiterate a familiar message or comment on society concerning that of body image and image perfection. Yet in doing so, I wanted to put my own spin on it and take it to an extreme. I wanted to show what happens when the pursuit of perfection takes over completely. It consumes the mind and body, overwhelming it with meticulous detail to the point that these little perfections create big mistakes and make a real person into a fake replica of perfection. In all, my theme comments on the world fashion and beauty magazines and how they’re air-brush models are actually technologically engineered paintings. What I intended was for a collage made from many tiny and color-manipulated images of Vogue covers. I wanted to create a “processed beauty”—one that would appear to be pretty but overshadowed by the dozens of other distracting and unnatural details. My inspiration draws from my own liking to fashion, ironically. I adore anything and everything that deals with design, especially in the department of clothing design. Yet what upsets me the most about the world of fashion is that it’s competitive in conforming to both the design and the “look”. Designers and models compete for perfection yet this perfection is a standard perfection meaning that it’s already be done but it can be re-vamped to a certain, though safe, degree. Yet what the world of fashion fails to acknowledge is that differences in beauty and design add to a forever dynamic, forever expanding universe of new ideas and new tastes. There should not be just one “look” or one design. It leaves little room for creativity let alone originality. And it’s certainly not healthy.

            Now the process to create my piece surely was a chaotic one. I began with a fairly complicated idea to begin with. I wanted to use a photograph of a model and map out areas of shading, color, and separate the many different hues in their skin tone. Then, taking whole pictures of the magazines covers (rather than pieces of them), I wanted to place them one back one and manipulate their hues each individually to correspond to the light and shadows in the model’s face. I actually began executing this idea, taking every single picture, cutting and pasting, then finally matching the hues together. Yet the problems I ran into were time and trouble with the controls. Because of the many different colors used in each magazine cover, it was very difficult to uniformly change the hue. I’d get variances in tones and values but never really what I wanted. It also proved to be a tedious task, having to perform the same actions for the hundreds of photos I pulled. So I scrapped some but not all the idea and began using other tools like the opacity, fill, eraser, lasso, smudge, blur, burn, and healing tools. These tools basically allowed me to cut out and paste the necessary and delete what was unnecessary. The blur, burn, and smudge tools allowed me to mesh the pictures together and hide the seams, while the opacity and fill tools allowed me further blend them photos into the skin tone of the model. It still proved tedious but as I repeated each action over and over again, I began to grasp a few good concepts of Photoshop that I did not have before.

            Through this process, I also learned a great deal about my work habits which may or may have not contributed to the chaos. I learned that I work very slowly and I put a lot of thought into the piece as a whole as well as that I give a good deal of attention to each individual layer, spending anywhere from 5 to even 10 minutes per layer. Yet what I could definitely improve on is organizing as I go. I found that I was paying more attention to detail than to organization of detail. For instance, many of my layers didn’t have names or labels and they were selected and placed randomly. It was really difficult to go back and adjust layers because I would see something needed to be fixed but the layer was lost among the many other layers of the piece. So definitely, more organization would have probably made for an even more pleasing outcome. What I ended up doing rather, was simply building layers on top of one another and blending them together using the opacity and smudge tools. For me, the finished project looks a bit messy in that some seams are still visible and the piece looks a little patchier than I had hoped. If I had the chance to change my process, I would have paid more attention to organization and than the outcome. This would have defined the features better and given the face more depth. Yet I’m pleased with the outcome because the model’s face looks as fake and as unnatural as my theme intended

            The work as a finished piece looks unnatural as intended but there is a much needed use for organization and neatness to really the define features of the figure. The piece also seems too overwhelming with the many cutouts and pastes and mashing and meshing together. Because of this distraction, the figure as a whole becomes less important whereas its parts are given more attention. The figure also looks a little too unrealistic—almost cartoon-like. Yet can this also correspond with the theme of irregular and overly processed beauty? With fake beauty, do models lose every tiny flaw that makes them human and subsequently become digitally constructed animations in trying? It seems so. They begin as themselves, and then they are given the opportunity to become a robot or puppet for the fashion world. They take it thus allowing their image of beauty to conform to an incredibly unrealistic image of perfection that can never be achieved without the help of technology. This piece seemed to do an effective job of morphing a collection of meshed minds and blurred out faces together. There are variation in shading and coloration which give it some depth. With that the piece seems worthy of an A- or B+ but there is a good deal of organization that needs to be improved upon. The resolution as well could prove to be a problem when it is printed, but I’m confident that the adjustments made will completely disrupt the piece. The final product, although chaotic with messy organizational methods, displays shading and the colors embedded within the skin- tone. An observer can see how it was created and that the artist wanted to create a beautiful face smothered by dozens of ads and other generic faces. So all in all, the theme was achieved but can be made better with a little cleanup.

           

Collage of Faces