Today I want to show you the shooting I had yesterday in one of the most beautiful parks in Hamburg – in Volkspark. It was a beautiful sunny day and I was standing not behind of the camera as usual, but in front of it.

My new favorite piece – red coat from H&M inspired me to create this look.

I hope you will like it.

Many thanks to my husband who took this lovely pictures of me.

Girls are made of polka dots!I love polka dots! They are everywhere for spring and summer 2011. Actually polka dots have never really gone out of style. They have become a classic. They have experienced ups and downs in popularity, have been relegated to swim suits and children’s clothes. While polka dots are ancient, they first became common on clothing in the late nineteenth century in Britain. At the same time polka music was extremely popular and the name was also applied to the pattern, despite no real connection between them. Some believed that during the First World War the British used polka dots as a place to hide Morse code and other secrets without being noticed.I believe every girl or woman has something with this pattern in it’s wardrobe. So, here are my favorite pieces: Blue white polka dot overall worn with Tasha Drugakova hand made fabric flowers collier and La Perla vintage sunglasses:

This lovely light blue polka dot vintage skirt I bought at a flea market. Python leather vintage clutch is from ebay.

Some details:

“Ivory”, 2011

hair, makeup – Tasha Drugakova

models – Tjarret, Shikiko

In this series I tried to show only some types of them.  Being one part of a bouquet they hide themselves in real flowers. Today I’m gonna share with you two self-portraits.

Tulip and Lily Calla

My first year in University I was studying philosophy and we learned Plato’s Symposium. The speech of Aristophanes made me very curious. It was an explanation why people in love say they feel “whole” when they have found their love partner. It is, he says, because in primal times there were three sexes : the all male, the all female, and the “androgynous,” who was half man, half woman and they were very powerful. The creatures tried to scale the heights of heaven and planned to set upon the gods . Zeus thought about blasting them to death with thunderbolts, but did not want to deprive himself of their devotions and offerings, so he decided to cripple them by chopping them in half, in effect separating the two bodies. Ever since that time, people run around saying they are looking for their other half because they are really trying to recover their primal nature.

“Each of us when separated, having one side only, like a flat fish, is but the tally-half of a man, and he is always looking for his other half.”

This was the main idea of the project I started to work in 2009. I wanted to show two parts of a person, one male and another female. I also believe that each of us still has both entities.We all are different and look different but there is something we all have in common. We are all looking for our better half.

The concept (Baerbel Recktenwald and Dietlind Wolf) was to show beautiful flower bouquets created by Dietlind Wolf in a more vintage postcard style.

This comes naturally made through the photography technique I use and serves as an example thereof. The casting was also great and we found lovely models, all in all it was great fun to work on this project. It also gave me some new experience and inspiration, as flowers have not been, until now, a part or focus of my work.   And the spring will also come soon to our part of the Earth, so i hope you enjoy this story.

But first a small intro about how I started to use textures in my work. It was around 8 years ago when I became involved in photography, I was a member of a photography website, where I met some great artists. Emil Schildt was one who inspired me immediately with his wonderful work – it is, in fact,  incredibly beautiful. He works with an analog camera and processes his photos using dark room techniques, he uses vintage techniques as well. One particular of them I found very interesting, it’s called “Kill Your Darlings” and is achieved by destroying the negative. I also wanted to get the same result, but I had no possibility to work in a darkroom, I used  – already back then! – a digital camera, so I thought I would try it in Photoshop.

I would also like to mention that my love for those textures and scratches comes from my vision of our world. We all have some imperfections, little scars, we are not those glamorous blurred beauties we see everyday on the pages of different magazines. I hated that plastic look of digital photos. That’s why I decided to bring them into another light using textures, this is not just a philosophy but a mere vision and an attempt to breathe life into otherwise unreal and plastic digital photos.

I never work with any plug-ins or custom brushes, all my textures are hand made and applied in a simplest way in a post-processing program to the main photograph. It is very important to me that the process does not evolve mainly into digital post-processing but has a touch of handwork in it.

“Of course, there will always be those who look only at technique, who ask “how,” while others of a more curious nature will ask “why.” Personally, I have always preferred inspiration to information.” , said Man Ray and I totally agree with him. I believe that using different techniques or adding textures is not enough, or shouldn’t be the main focus of the work.  Textures should serve merely as instrument to add some mood to the image.

So now to the actual textures guide. Today I’d like to show you how to create simple yet very widely applicable and beautiful watercolor textures.  All you need is a blank piece of paper and watercolor. Apply it on paper with a piece of wadding to get this kind of an effect:

In addition, there is another way of making fancier and deeper watercolor textures with scratches.

Take a blank piece of paper and paint it with some – preferably – light color of your choice, for example with yellow with various brush strokes, as shown in this picture and leave some spare space around to get some kind of a frame, of course more or less evenly situated.

After the watercolor has dried up , take a regular candle and apply some wax on paper. Put another color above the wax, some contrast color, for example red, as shown here:

When this layer is also dry take a needle and make scratches on the surface, this is the creative part where you have to obviously try various techniques to achieve the result that suits your images best. In the end, you should get something like this:

Note how you can regulate how the yellow layer is visible through the scratches, this also adds some sort of a 3D effect to the whole texture.

Hope this gives many of you some inspiration to try out different textures! In the next posts I will go through the simple ways to combine the textures with your images in Photoshop – or any other digital post-processing software, for that matter.

You can also comment/contact me if you’ve got points of interest that I could cover in my next posts!

]]> http://www.lilyacorneli.com/blog/2011/02/selfportrait-with-a-crown-ii/feed/ 7