What does Dan Hillier compile to create artwork with?

His main interests are in psychedelic art and...?

... iconography and old ancient traditions.

What was the name of the artwork I drew inspiration from for my practical design?

What did I choose to photograph to incorporate to my artwork?

What main transformation did I apply to my images in Photopea to make it portrait instead of landscape?

Photography inspired by Dan Hillier & Magdiel Lopez


Key Stage 3

Art and design

Identity: who I am

Dave Mackean is an English illustrator, photographer, comic book artist, graphic designer, filmmaker and..

Can you remember what the title of the hand image was?

...the hard life lessons that real people go through.

...the lessons he had to learn to pass his education.

...the psychology lessons he studied in university.

What does he also find inspiration in. He has said: It is all in the...

On a practical note what did I prepare in advance before my lessons?

What aggression did I perform to one of my images?

﻿- Welcome to art with Ms. Corral. And we're gonna be studying or looking at Dan Hillier and trying a bit of a photographic response. We're gonna learn and understand the work of Dan Hillier, which still belongs to that surreal collage work. We're gonna try to apply the artists' techniques using analogue and digital media, looking at developing a slightly more personal response to the theme of identity your idea should be shaping by now. So, carrying on understanding how the theme and the identity, who am I, has been explored in art and design. You're gonna need the usual computer, tablet, or phone for editing images, for taking photographs, for doing research. Your materials, printouts, magazines, publications, paper, scissor, the usual. Okay, so I'm not gonna carry on. You have the same equipment as every lesson from now until the end of this unit. Pause the video to gather everything you need, all the work that you did last lesson, and when you're ready, please restart and I'll be waiting. So this is the work of Dan Hillier. And our focus is gonna continue being surreal illustration, collage, and photography. In the three examples that you see here, and this is one piece of artwork called "Wolf," there is a figure. And inside the figure's body, especially in the head, there is an overlay or layering of other images. And that is a closeup of how he does that. He uses printmaking and he uses etching. He also uses drawing. Now these images are not his photographs. He finds old images, normally Victorian or Edwardian, and he combines them in the computer. When he's happy with a design, he develops it using printing methods, and sometimes he draws them. This is another example. What I like about it is in the context of who am I, this one could deal with the fragmentation of not actually knowing who you are. This one, I've chosen two, to put together. One is called "Daughter," and the other one is called "Mother and Child," very much borrowing from the imagery of the Virgin and Jesus Christ. We've got four different examples of identity, and what could identity represent. These kind of composition is used a lot in film posters as well. Which one is your favourite? This final one, the hands like this always suggest religious figures, contemplating, or praying. You see that a lot in iconography of Catholic and Christian imagery. He has done two variations here. And in his latest interviews and work, he talks about his interest in the cosmo and the connection between man and nature and our role in the whole universe. It's quite interesting to listen to Dan Hillier talk, by the way. This one is called "Pachamama," and Dan Hillier goes travelling and he experiments with natural substances that have hallucinatory properties. He uses these state of mind to visualise his images and his work. And it's linking back to the 70s psychedelia and that flower power and those experiments that were mentioned with psychedelic drugs. But the images were here is very different, because it doesn't have colour. It's black and white. The figure is gazing at you. But again, this dissolution of the actual figure about from the hands and the eyes staring at you. The figure loses its humanity, if you like, to become part of the whole world or cosmology or nature. And he uses that device a lot. Like Adam Hale, we see the suggestion of masks where human beings are almost the human hide of the skin, apart from the eyes or the cutout of the face. So again, in your own words, let's do research a little bit later. Who would be Dan Hillier and what do you think you would be famous for? Why can his work be described as surreal as well? How can it fit with an identity theme. I've already sort of spoken about it. And in terms of symbolism, what do you think the sitters' poses reassemble? Which again, I've talked about it a little bit. So, quick glimpse, the images. Poses, backgrounds, gaze. I'm gonna stay with these questions. I'm gonna give you five minutes. Pause, try to answer them, jot down your opinions. Right, now Dan Hillier is another English artist and he works mainly on collage. He compiles all Victorian books and illustrations, which he transforms and reimagines, as I said, and his main interest, nowadays, 'cause he used to do all sorts of things with anthropomorphism, but now he's interested in psychedelia and the cosmic. In close up, what could you say about colours, texture, meaning, and link to identity in his artwork? Now it's time to find out more in detail about his work. He has got an official website. So research the artist. Who is Dan Hillier? And find examples of his work. Pause the video for about 10 minutes to do your research. And when you've got a good mood board of images that you like and information on the artist, restart and we move on to the practical task. Now a quick glimpse at a quote from Dan Hillier. "I am really interested in archetypes and iconography "and old traditions, old ancient traditions." Especially he mentions his interest in the East and his interest in travelling to India Nepal, Tibet, "Buddhist iconography and Tibetan art "having powerful effect." If you have done your image research, you find sometimes there are images that have sitting cross-legged. They're using hands. Again, a very mystical, if you like, symbolism in his artwork. Now for photography task, we're gonna concentrate on "Pachamama," this image here. At least I am going to. This is gonna be my source of inspiration. So what I've done is I've developed a collage with that composition of the eyes, and the neck and shoulders and the expansion of the head. But then what I'm gonna do is I want to photograph my hands, trying to overlap my hands with my collage later on in the lesson. Think about what are you gonna do, whether you're gonna work with a collage that you already have, whether you just want to start something new and you want to photograph yourselves, and then use some of the techniques that I'm going to do lessons. Think about pose, props, locations. For now, perhaps just watch and then make your decision as to what you want to do practically. For the photography task, you can see here, these are other examples of students that instead of using their own photographs, they used images from the internet, but for the hand. So again, using Photoshop used and put together to create that surreal effect. And this is the first stage, in fact the final stage, of my collage prior to the digital manipulation. You can see how I've linked the composition here to the eyes. You can see there's an element of shoulders. And I did add some colour effects to suggest the head later on. Let's have a look at the demo. First of all, I started with the same steps as before, cutting out another copy of my image. Then I found a background that I want to use. I'm using eyeshadow from my daughter just to prove that you don't have to use fancy images, created a silhouette. And I'm also gonna cut out those little figurines. They're gonna take part in the conversation later on. I've glued everything in. I've sort of skipped fast so you can see how I'm adding colour to the different components. My hands got very mucky. I added the shoulder. I considered adding hair the old fashioned way, but I decided to go down the big head explosion. Now this is where I add the PVA and where the colours melting and blending together. I did lose an eye. I had to rescue it. This image is quite big, so it was hard to fit it onto my visualizer. Then I used gouache. And this is what I started really enjoying and discovered that I wanted to paint in my background By the time to image dried, I'd lost some of the details. So I had to go over it with a fine line, I'll show you example later on. And that is the first stage of the collage and the second stage of the college. If you want to have a go at developing your own collage, pause the video for about 15 minutes, try your practical exercise, looking at my demonstration, and then we move on to the photography task. Restart when you're ready to do the next stage. So photography. All I've done myself is take photos of hands. You can take selfies. You can take photos of your body, take photos of somebody else that has to do with identity. It doesn't matter. There are three variations which I considered, and I am showing you how my pose is trying to imitate or emulate the image that I've chosen as my starting point. Think about what is gonna be your image or images you're gonna choose as your starting points. Now what I did then is I opened my collage, my scanned collage, in Photoshop or Photopea. It doesn't matter. I mirrored it to turn it into a portrait image. And then I applied the photo of the hands. I removed the body. And I suggested the body a little bit using blend modes again. Then I went back for the mirroring effect to see what it would look like. And then I finally turned it black and white, and that was my final outcome. The hands feel more like the hands of a pregnant woman holding the stomach. And I don't know whether that's just conscious, but it simply goes well with this mother and daughter identity theme, which funnily enough, it's beginning to shape, and it's gonna permeate into my next piece of work. That's the second variation where the backgrounds as they're mirrored and inverted, they create this x-ray, more unworldly effects. Let's have a look at how I did this in Photopea. This is the final scan opened in Photopea on an A4 document. And this is a photograph I took with my visualizer where you can see how when I added the ink, part of the print sort of dissolved hence my adding a little bit of pencil and a little bit of fine liner. You don't have to do this. This is just my own choice. So let's do the final manipulations. As always, Start, File, New, New Project A4 150 and press Create. Now I've got my scans folder. And, oh, I think I moved it. In my demos. Here is the scan. You could take a picture of your collage if you don't have a scanner. I'm gonna move it to the top, and I'm going to right-click and duplicate my layer. Then I'm gonna do an Edit, Transform, and Flip vertically. This will enable me to achieve the mirroring effect. I'm gonna slide it down until two parts of my image meet. I'm now going have a look at the photographs that I took. And these are the photos of my hands. I'm gonna use this one here. So I'm gonna pull it and drag it into Photopea. You could have done it by going File, Open & Place, and then browse for your photographs from your folder. Now the picture has been pulled to the bottom of my layers. So I need to click, hold it, and lift it upwards. It takes a while sometimes, because Photopea lags. So now, we need to get rid of the background. Ctrl + Plus to zoom in and the Space bar on the hand to pan around my image. Now, there are different ways in which I could do this. I could use the wrapper. For the time being, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna try to use the polygonal lasso select tool to mimic what I do with scissors. So I'm just clicking around the contours of the image. Try to not cut out into the image too much. And that will block my background. You could also use the technique that you learned in with the pen tool. 'Cause I'm zoomed in, I'm using the Space bar to alternate from the marquee select tool or polygonal select tool to the hand to enable me to pan into my image in closer. So I'm selecting all my body, apron, and hands for now, but I'm leaving out the neck. Press Enter when finished. You get a dashed line. The simplest thing to do now is just to do a copy and then a paste. Because I've selected the inside, I'm gonna click on my mask, and that is a little cutout. I can see where it could position it and if I want to make it bigger. Because I've got a transform control tools, I'm gonna hold Shift down. I'm gonna enlarge it, so that it looks like... I mean, the head is out of proportion, but that is fine. I'm quite happy with that. And that is the first stage. Now, I'm going to manipulate it further. I'm going to go back to the polygonal, and I could zoom in again before I click. I'm going to select the top of the apron. This time, I will do a copy and paste. And you can use different tools for these, the pen tool, the polygon lasso tool. Just for the sake of the demonstration, this one, if there's any lagging, it will not crash the recording. I don't need to worry about this area, because the background has been removed. If I turn this off, this is my image for the selection. So I want to go in Edit, Copy, clicking back onto my image, Edit, Copy Merged, and Edit, Paste. I'm sort of dubious, because I was worried that maybe it will not understand the mask, but it has done it. So that is the top of my apron just there. Now for the bottom, I'm gonna do exactly the same thing. I'm going to select. It doesn't matter if it's not 100% detailed. And here, I don't need to worry about the detail anymore. Press Enter and click back on the photograph, Edit, Copy Merged, and Edit, Paste. So now, I've got these two components, which I'm going to Merge Layers by. The way I did this is I clicked on the first layer, pressed the Control key, clicked on the other one and merged the layers. And now, I can select the pixels. Let me see. And I can click on my mask. Well, this is a little bit advanced, because I would do a select inverse. I may just do it in a simpler way for you. Just give me a second. First of all, I'm going to rasterize the picture, then I'm going to apply the mask, and then I'm going to delete that. That's probably the easiest way for you to understand this. So now I've got my background, I've got the hands, and I've got the apron. And with the hands, I can make them black and white. I'm gonna duplicate the layer first. I could convince it to smart object. Let's do this first so that you see. Image, Adjustment. I'm gonna go to Black & White. Okay, if you want to, if you need to do this step and you want to control the contrast of your image, this is the place to do it. Don't push to the extremes. If you see something doesn't change, it's because there was no colour. So I don't have a lot of green and cyan in my skin tone. So let me make it be lighter, and I'm gonna press OK. I could also adjust the levels of the contrast if I want to increase the contrast of my image. So that's the first stage. With the apron, all I'm gonna do is I'm gonna put it in blend mode first and see what happens. Oh, that's nice. That's nice. That's nice. Oh, I really like that. I could also put a blend mode in my hands to show a little bit of the watercolour, and then either try a blend mode with the black and white. It just shows a little bit of good transparency. Like that perhaps, or like that, or I could have it normal, or maybe with a little bit less opacity, so that it's not so obvious. And that is the first stage. You should go File, Export as a JPEG. It will save as a JPEG. What I want to do now is I'm going to select it all and Edit, Copy Merged. That's gonna copy all of my layers. I'm gonna go File, New. Press Create, Edit, Paste. I could export, File, Export this image from here. Now I want to click on the crop tool. And now I'm gonna try to crop my canvas. So instead of cropping, I'm gonna make it bigger. Okay, so my canvas has doubled in size. And then all I have to do is duplicate the layer, go Edit, Transform, and do what I did before flip horizontally. And I got two choices. I can go for this effect and save it as a JPEG, or I can go for the opposite effect. Finally, when you're happy with your result, you can duplicate your layers. Try pressing Control, so you duplicate both layers if you want, and then merge them. So now that the layers are merged, you can either convert them to smart objects or skip this step, entirely up to you. And then do an image adjustment. And here again, you can now do variations of your image. This is where you can turn it into black or white and have control over what you see. It makes a massive difference what you change. Just be mindful of how and what do you want to focus on. If you want to focus on the figure, don't add a lot of white into your background. You can also image adjust and change the levels that's gonna look at the overall contrast, so you can make your image darker. You can also add a little bit more white light, and that is pretty much the end of this demonstration. Let's export this as a JPEG. And let's stop. Try this Photopea task and restart when you're finished. If you don't want to do the Photopea task, then move on to the end of the lesson. So all in all, again, my thinking hands and the materials have taken a turn on their own from my link to Spanish culture, the head of this folk singer that my grandmother used to listen to on television and the radio remains. And I tried to incorporate those elements, surreal elements Dan Hillier. I am quite pleased with the outcome. It's not what I expected, I have to say, I did incorporate an element of drawing. I don't know if you can see that this is the collage, and if I bring it closer, I had to go over some of the details with outlines. When I add the PVA, that's what happens. I lose a bit of the quality of the print, which in a way, it's nicer, because it means that I can incorporate my drawing into it. It has certainly helped me see where I want to take it next. And then our final lesson, we're gonna look at developing the final piece. I have my idea. I know what I'm doing. If you need some time to think about it, take your time. Use the time from this lesson to next to prepare and make sure that you have completed your previous responses. Those stages of development will help you make up this idea on who you are. And I will see next lesson. So since we're finished, it's time to take the end of the lesson quiz and see what stuck from today's learning. As usual, it's been a pleasure teaching you and I look forward to teaching you again next lesson. Goodbye.

Photography inspired by Dan Hillier & Magdiel Lopez

Photography inspired by Dan Hillier & Magdiel Lopez

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UnitArt and design / Identity: who I am

Art and design