One of the mask drawings.
It’s no fun to work on something all day only to have it not turn out well in the end. I’m lucky that it doesn’t happen to me more often but it sure did happen to me last Sunday. I was dipping back into something I hadn’t done since 2009 and now I remember why. It’s hard to pull off. What I wanted to do is mix my drawing with my street photography. How I tried to do this was by drawing masks on the people in my photos. I actually did pull this off successfully back in 2009 in two photos and figure it was time to try it again. I vaguely remember trying to make a few more back then but not being successful at it. Now I remember why.
The first part of this process is to find a street photo of mine that I like. This isn’t always easy because I take photos in such a way that I’m not looking for one image as is usual in photography but am looking for a group of images that I can organize into the picture that I dream up. It’s a different way of shooting photos. So when I have to find that one photo to turn into a masked photo I stumbled around a bit. I thought that I found one I liked but the next morning I didn’t care for it. So I looked through photo after photo on and off over Sunday morning. I say on and off because it gets frustrating looking for something that I can’t find. So I do some drawing and then go back to looking. Eventually I found one that I liked. It took a little prep work on the photo after that. Just basic straightening and cropping. I’d save the fancier stuff for later on in the process. But now I had to figure out how to draw masks over the two faces.
I like to draw masks. It’s one of the recurring themes in my work. I draw them all the time. Ideally for this project I should be able to draw the masks right on the computer. That should be a time saver and fit in with the theme. I have all the necessary equipment to be able to do it but for some reason I find drawing on the computer, even with a tablet, clumsy and I have a hard time with it. My solution was to abandon digital drawing and print out the faces onto which I was going to draw masks onto bristol board in grayscale. I printed out the faces about four inches tall so that I could draw the masks fairly large.
And the other mask drawing
Of course the drawing of the masks took longer than I thought it would. Isn’t that always the case? Sometimes I can knock one out in mere minutes but in this case I had to draw them at angles specific to the faces I was using and make them work with the photo in general. It probably took me about an hour a mask to draw and then ink. I liked them too. I think they came out pretty cool.
I then scanned the two masks into the computer and gave them a quick color. That still took another half an hour because as we all know these things take longer than you think. I didn’t even bother to do any real coloring on the masks and went with some quick and basically harmonious shades. After that I pasted the first mask on top of the photo and attempted to put it in place. Except I couldn’t.
It wasn’t a matter of scale. I drew the mask at a bigger size than the finished piece and knew that I would scale it down. It was a matter of it not looking right. I tried the mask larger and smaller. I tried distorting the mask and bending it around the head a little bit more. I tried making the mask various percentages of transparency to let some of the woman’s face show through. It all looked clumsy and pointless. I decided to bring in the second mask and see if with the two of them I could get things to work. As you might imagine it only made things worse. After working on the thing for a good four or five hours I abandoned it. That’s a terrible feeling but not as bad as trying to get something to work that I know is not going to.
I now remember that one of the reasons I stopped doing these back in 2009 is that they take a lot longer than I thought they would. I like the idea of them: to take photos of people in the street that are anonymous to me and make them totally anonymous to everyone but the idea appeals to me partly because it seems so easy to execute. But it’s not. It takes way more subtly, time, and thought than I guessed it would. And it’s not an idea that I like to take up so much of my time. I don’t like it that much.
I think that the two pictures I finished using this technique five years ago worked not only because I put the time into them but because they were the photos that inspired the idea. They were the photos that made me think, “A-ha, I can do something with these”. The other ones were a big maybe and a maybe with more work attached than I was interested in giving to the idea.
Another thing just occurred to me as I was writing this. One thought that went through my head as I was finding it hard to pick a photo to use was to draw expressions on the mask. I liked the faces and expressions on some of the people in the photos since that was what I was aiming for when taking the pictures so I figured maybe I could somehow match the expressions on the mask. Within the first minute of drawing the first mask I realized this was a terrible idea since I draw the masks with weird and far-out expressions and there was no way they could match the subtle and fleeting looks on people’s faces. It was a day of abandoned ideas.
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