Commentary:My first challenge was thinking of the name of the album to help inspire the direction of the photomontage.
After some thinking I came up with the band name: MOLT (which is the acronym for the leadership team I serve on at work), and the album title "Everything's an Argument" - which was the name of a book sitting on my coffee table. I thought it was appropriate since everything IS an argument among the marketing operations leadership team. It was apropos.
At any rate, I began my sketching:
I was trying to come up with ideas that would represent office politics, or even arguments in general. However number 4 intrigued me. First, it left the concept of "everything's an argument", instead I went with "compromise" (still in line with my fickle and argumentative leadership team).
Compromise was eventually what I pursued.
The original concept was a tree in the foreground, with a city scape in the background. Windows would be in the leaves of the tree. Almost as if to compromise for the sake of the environment, instead of tearing a tree down we turned the tree into an apartment building... compromise. Again, I went away from the original theme of office politics.
Finding images:
I resorted to the internet for photographs. I came upon https://pixabay.com, which provides royalty free, creative commons imagery that can be used anywhere without reference (score).
I needed a tree, some windows, and
I collected the following:
The end result:
The images were composited all together to create my initial vision. I played with the levels of each image to go for an almost "painted" effect to get away from the photographic element.
I also experimented with lighting effects to add some depth to the image.
Straying again from my original concept, I decided that the city scape would be viewed through the windows, instead of behind the tree.
If you notice, the windows are actually on the outside - you would think that you would be looking into a house, however you're looking OUT into the city view. Changing the idea that the city is actually inside the tree...
Enjoy,
AP
