Editing my Deer head piece photos and planning my next photoshoot

All in all I took about 175 shots and chose 15 which were up to scratch. I went into Pixlr online to see what they would look like if i edited them. I saturated them so they would look less colored and more icy toned, and chose some of the hats to be the only pop of color.

I'm really happy with the way these turned out, I think they look really cool!

For my next photo shoot i'm going to take Arlene and do her hair and makeup again but make her makeup more like a deer and bring her down to the old Magdeline Laundries bathrooms under the college. I think this will make for a really interesting shoot and make the head pieces seem very out of context which is what I want.

I also plan to bring a few friends out into a forest and put my colored head pieces on them. Dress them all in black and get them to pose for me. I think that this will make for a really interesting photo shoot  It will almost look like a heard of deer in the woods.

Making my Deer moulds into hats!

I've been interested for a while of turning my deer casks into hats, or head piecing as I've been looking alto at Isabella blow and Philip Treacy.

I love Isabella blows work with the lobster and the deer antler type head pieces so I thought it would be interesting if i did my own.


Isabella Blow




Isabella Blow



Isbella Blow



So to do this, i asked my friend Arlene if she would model for me in our preliminary photographs, just so I could get an idea of what they would look like.

We spent the afternoon doing her hair, backcombing it and pining it so the hair pieces would stick and then giving her very dark and sultry makeup.
I chose the head pieces I wanted to use in the bright colors like grey, pink , black and white and directed her how to pose. I then placed the head pieces in her hair and photographed them with a black background.I didn't have a lightbox so I tried to change the lighting by getting a desk lamp and bringing it from behind and in front of the corner we were working on.It seemed to work well for what i was going for.

My Resin Teasups

I really love my resin tea cups, they came out even better than I had hoped for. For some reason putting the, in the porcelin cups made the resin so cleat and shiny. Whatever I put in them just glowed.

More Teacups and Research

While I was getting my tea cups filled with clear resin, I decided to do a bit more research on artists who used found objects and parts of animals and I came across Polly Morgan. Her most famous work ''Endless Pain'' Was a show about the cycle of life and death. She wanted to created spaces within hollowed out bodies. She is well known for her taxidermy pieces and endless pain was no different.

“My new work is about a corruption of nature. It’s not things as they would happen; birds don’t eat mushrooms, pigs don’t suckle trees, octopuses don’t inhabit dead fox carcasses, generally, but I wanted to do a perverse representation of nature. But I don’t think I've pushed it to the realm of fantasy and it’s almost believable.”

Her work is mostly with little flightless birds, almost representing abortion, called 'still birth'. A dead chick with only a helium balloon to keep it floating , not flying. I personally love her work. I think It relates very much to my work as I deal with the bones of dead animals just in different ways. Instead of highlighting the death of the animal I try to change it into something beautiful. But the strange thing is her work is incredibly beautiful!

Teacup

I started looking at the way I was presenting my work, I liked how it was very archival but that wasn't exactly what I was trying to say with my work . So I started to think about the opposite of the way if  was presenting it . I went through many things like old medicine bottles,similar to Damien Hirst in 'Pharmacy' and the objects falling out of them. Then somehow I came to tea cups and china cups and it all seemed to fit into place. I went to a charity shop and got china cups and saucers in a set. I then glued the the saucers to the cups, I put my different pieces of crab and prawns.

I was researching artists like Robert Lazzarini who warped a tea cup and saucer to confuse peoples view of perception. I was also looking  Meret Oppenheim who covered a tea cup in hair and made it very impractical. 

I was trying to find a relation to my work in these artists, seeing how they developed their ideas and how they got to where they were. I wanted to create something that fitted together as a whole but were perfect separate also. I thought the teacup fitted this description.

Damien Hirst 'Pharmacy'

Robert Lazzarini

Meret Oppenheim