Exercise: Shadow play

In the flat I live in, we benefit from big windows facing South so I decided to first explore what I could do with the light of the sunrise.

We have a big pile of books that don’t fit the normal shelf size so at sunrise, I decided to rearrange to try to make a cityscape on the living room wall. I managed to play around with different size books and things underneath the books to get different sized skyscrapers and used a biscuit tin and some vases to get different shaped towers etc. 

It came out like a skyline on the purple wall. The only issue was the fact that sunlight is strong but so far away that the definition of the silhouette was fuzzy but it was still quite a nice effect. Indeed it could have been a hazy horizon. Some of the originals are here below. I tried to put a piece of paper also to help focus the camera better but it really was related more to the sunlight. The bluer one came out better as it was just as the sun was rising and somehow the direction and brightness of the light was better.

Then I played around with photoshop on hue, saturation, lightness etc and to crop and create a final one that I liked. It’s almost a kind of distant, hazy and smoky city pre-drawn!

I then found some drawing mannequins and got a bunch of plants and used my table and chairs to cast a shadow on the side of the kitchen table with the sunlight also. I added a handkerchief dress and hair to make it like a woman and man in a secrete romantic setting. I even found a small hat I could use which is a memento of the panamanian hat (originally from Ecuador) from when I was in Ecuador.

I had to move around the plants and chairs etc and distance of the plants and characters but this worked well. Here are some of the original shots:

Here is the final edited one using photoshop as above. I made it darker like it was a twilight meeting, made it more blue and added some starry sky. The only issue with using sunlight in this way is that it still looks quite blurry but depending on what effect you are going for, it works. This softer fuzzier look gives a certain hazy, magical feeling that works with these types of images but it wouldn’t with others.

So then I tried artificial light at night and decided to try some cut outs and colour card and other backgrounds for some other different scenes.

I started with an under sea scene in a cartoon fashion. I drew on card and cut them out and then found plastic to put them on and emptied a photo frame and put it all in there to hold it up. I tried it on a wall and door with a flashlight this time. The plastic was old so it gave a nice textured look actually. I played around with distance between each to try and see also how to do the light and also take the photo without casting a shadow myself.

I then decided that the grey wall was a bit boring and hunted for something blue – and found a wooly cover! This had stripes and a nice texture that I thought would work and it would also not be an entirely flat surface more adequate for a watery scene.

Here is the final one I edited with Photoshop. I made it greener in colour and slightly darker for a more sea worthy effect!

I then tried again with a little house and trees to be projected onto colour card background I prepared as rolling hills and a sky in different shades. What I hadn’t quite realised was how I should have made the background bigger to fit the silhouette so I had to really play around to get the same A4 size silhouette to fit into the A4 background with distance and angle so I could also photograph it.

Here is my edited version but I hadn’t quite realised how the shadow would also be so different with the various coloured cards so it broke the shadow down a bit. The wall also brings out the texture in the paint which I actually quite like though for a landscape it would have been better if it were horizontal! So I had to block out the shadow better in the second version using new layers and adding black fill and softened the edges with the paintbrush online so it didn’t look too jarring. Depending on what you were aiming for, the break up of the shadow is quite cool.

Finally, I started playing around with kitchen utensils and the light and while I was exploring found a nice balloon shape and thought I could try to capture a hot air balloon!

This took some serious thinking and trialling and I had to get my partner to hold the light for me while I trialled things so I could figure out the place of the utensils. Finally I tied them with string as per the above and below:

And came up with the following originals but it was hard to balance the light and of course the shadows of the string so I tried to get the strings to be under the balloon as if linking the basket as indeed they usually are.

I finally edited this in Photoshop to get the below. I had to smudge out the extra lines and used it to create a cloudy atmosphere for a sky. I also changed the colour hues to get a more blue grey for the sky.

Reflections:

• It takes a lot of time and patience to get shapes you want with the right distance and light!
• Blurry or defined edges takes some doing also although I found the slight blur of edges to be a nice soft whimsical touch but of course it depends what you are aiming for.
• I have never imagined so many objects could cast such random shadows.
• I have a more profound appreciation for the work of the artists I researched in the previous exercise given the time and precision it takes.
• I also was wondering though that really, you can create silhouettes directly without making them per se but at the same time, the making process really reveals interesting things, ideas and opportunities that I would never have come up with the above had I not had to experiment somehow