Post #6: The Floral Telegram
This is my first time using photoshop so navigating through this project took a lot of clicks and re-clicks. When I was finding my phrase, I wanted to incorporate the idea of death and life (in a sense) into my project. I ended up choosing the phrase “Beautiful despot, I adore you. My passion is consuming. I wither as will these flowers.” I chose 9 different flowers to represent this message. I wanted the colors to have a scheme of passion and adoration so my flower colors were mainly pinks, purples, and reds. Starting from the bottom right flower my numbers were 125-226-119. In respective order, the flowers I chose were sweet William, heart’s ease, larkspur, primrose, rose, ivy, aconite, myrtle, and amaranth. I chose these flowers partially based on their meaning, color, name and/or texture.
For the first set of flowers I used sweet William because the person is adoring the despot and honoring him and I thought the name could be representative of what they would call the despot. I used heart’s ease because I wanted to display the color of the oppression of the tyrant consuming the person’s heart. The larkspur was used to show how the heart has been taken over by the ruler.
For the second set of flowers I used primrose, rose and ivy. I used primrose and rose to represent the color of passion. Roses are known for “love” and “enduring passion” (teleflora.com). The irony of this is associated with thorns on the roses which I wanted the audience to feel the evil pricking the person’s heart and the passion seeping through and taking over. The last flower I used for this set was ivy, which evokes the thought of poison ivy and the image of poison taking over the heart.
For the third set of flowers, I used aconite, myrtle, and amaranth. The aconite and myrtle were used for their wispy look to show the flowers withering. The dark, red, and spikes of amaranth represent the death and withering of the person as the despot consumes their life.
The color of the text was representative of the feeling evoked from the phrase. Adoration of an oppressor, passion, and death of the person over time. I wanted the background to produce a dreamlike consciousness that the person sees while withering into death. The pitch black on the outside is them settling into the darkness of death. For the ring of the flowers, I used vine and I cut them into three’s to separate each flower phrase. Vine makes me feel suffocation and I wanted to display the suffocation (unknowingly) of the person from the tyranny of the despot.
I think searching for images labelled only for reuse or reuse with modification really limited my choices in picking flowers. Cutting the flowers took some time because it was difficult to navigate through photoshop. I added shadows at the end to show depth and make the flowers look more realistic on the canvas. Overall, this project made me think a lot about the message I wanted to send to the audience and how to creatively incorporate the message I put together.
Special thanks to my sister for creating the background for me and LoveofAnna for helping me with shadows and photoshop. :)