The story behind this piece is based on the mental disability of being “bipolar”. I wanted to express this by have two of the same faces become completely different from each other. The face to the right has a “blue” expression on his face, communicating a sad expression on his face. The left face you see is a devilish-like minded with a evil smirk on his face. Lastly the large brick wall which has been spray painted “Mind the Gap”. Being bipolar means having a pair of personalities in one head. Most of the time, one of the personalities have a bad mood swing that could change within a matter of seconds. One moment, you may see this person as a polite, caring, loving person, but within seconds, they can become completely demonic.
By saying mind the gap, you are ignoring the large gap between the two objects and allowing them to pass through each other. Which is like having two completely different personalities cross back and forth to each other. That is what this mystery meaning of “Mind the Gap” is.
My original concept was also completely different from the final piece. My original concept was to create a scene of me in the city overviewing it. As idea moved to another one, it ended up becoming something bipolar. I was happy with the idea, so I began to begin working.
I started by taking a few pictures of myself with a sad, and crazy expression. After that, I uploaded the best looking one to photoshop and started editing. Now from here, things got interesting. I was originally just going to mask the whole face red and blue, but I was literally playing around in photoshop and accidentally came across a nice looking effect through “colour range selection”. This effect only left an accurate outline of my overall face and hair, then faded out the rest. This faded effect gave the piece the feeling of being “faded” away into your own self.
Another accident I encountered was with colour masking. When selected the face through colour range and edited it with a mask, the colour only showed up on the face, not the hair. This gave the expression of his face a much better feeling with the colour. For example, the red colour gave the feeling of a hot headed, angry expression.
The next step was figuring out a background. The original idea was a dark to light gradient background of black and white. I then noticed that I need a minimum of 3 pictures in my surrealist piece. I searched up a few free stock photos on flickr for gradient, but found none that would fit this piece. I typed in random words that came to mind for the background like: clouds, street, road, space, etc. Then I just typed in the word “mind”. For mind, all I could find were a bunch of signs saying “mind the gap”. From then, the idea struck me of using that as my background and slogan.
I added a brick wall with that title, and matched perfectly. I feel every project i complete, I increase my creativity, but this particular project raised my creativity greatly. I never thought would be able to create such a simple art piece with great meaning and purpose. I am much satisfied with the result I came up with, and i’m excited to see if i’ll ever create something better than this. I chose this final edit out of 6 different edits. Choosing this one as the end result satisfies me well.
Attribution: http://www.flickr.com/photos/phalissssss/43584733/sizes/l/
