Surrealism: Urban Fantasy

Surrealism???

Most of us having no background in artistic concepts had a hard time grasping the concept... is it this?...or that? is it a composition of elements that are real, but arranged in a way that makes it unreal?
Nevertheless, this is my attempt at a surrealism piece:

The concept behind is this piece is:
A young girl's fantasy of her favourite dolls which takes place in a urban setting. The dolls have just awaken from their sleep. The paradox is that the dolls have become humans and the buildings are their toys.

I got this concept from Godzilla. However, firstly I do not have a Godzilla toy and secondly I did not really want to symbolise doom.

The technical work involved were:

• Taking pictures of the building and the dolls. It was tedious as I have to estimate an appropriate angles to place the dolls. It took me three tries to get them right.

• Next was tracing the building and MRT tracks into paths so that I can copy and paste and to change the colour of the sky.

• I have to crop out the dolls from their white background
  

• I used the brushes available in photoshop for the stars.

• I blurred out the frontmost and backmost dolls to create an effect of different depth of field and the focus will only be on the doll in the purple pajamas.

• Finally, I took some pictures of my white polo tee to add a layer of texture on the piece to create a 'fabric' feeling which symbolise softness of the blanket.

Comments given by the class and Ms Chiang were:

• The sky resembles the national flag...red and white? Probably I got to change the colour
• The major problem with the piece is the lack of interactions between the dolls and the building
• Need to reduce the size of the buildings to make them more toy like/ or to change their colours to resemble lego buildings
• the picture is too dark
• I could use more real elements like cars and trains
  
• Could add some details to the dark MRT tracks
  

After the first tutorial, I decide that it would be rather impossible to add in interactions between the dolls and their surroundings since the figurines were fixed. Hence, I employed another set of dolls and a new background. Although it is a new piece of work, but the underlying concept remains.

The concept is still about a girly fantasy with the personification of the dolls. Instead of using a cloth texture, I overlay the entire image with a picture of bubbles. I blurred the two dolls in the foreground so as to direct viewers to focus their attention on the doll at the back. The image of the river taxi was duplicated and they were made to float in the air, enhancing the surreal and unrealistic aspects.



























Some comments were

• Viewers focus firstly on the doll on the left before looking at the rest of the image, which defeat the purpose of directing them to view the doll at the back by blurring
  
• I read somewhere that readers generally read from left to right, hence probably this is the reason who the doll on the left gets noticed first
• The blurring of the ships was not obvious enough