chuck reyes // national servicemen project

Hello!

Good morning assessors!

Welcome to my sketch-blog! As I do almost 100% of my work on the computer, I thought I would use a blog to record my thoughts and processes instead of a journal. It saves paper too!

To go through my blog, you can go through it page by page by scrolling to the bottom and clicking "Older Entries," or you can look through the categories on the right hand side of the page and choosing what might sound interesting.

Hope you enjoy my work!

Best

Chuck

layout for assessment

decided on an order already for my assessment layout. 11 is a weird number to show, but i don't wanna cut any out. i'll be making use of both spaces i've been allocated.

the order goes:

aaron -> zid -> sunny, on the left wall

joel -> shaf -> im -> khai -> ade, on the center wall

nat -> lip -> alif, on the right wall

i think the order seems balanced in terms of composition and color

opposites

one thing i noticed by doing this whitewash to the uniform is that i'm creating something that is the complete opposite of all those army adverts, like this one. in this ad, the soldier's face is camouflaged, like he's one with the uniform. the camouflage itself is made up of the faces of different men, and the soldier's face is racially ambiguous. a young man is meant to look at that ad and think "that could be me." it is as if the uniform will lets the identity blend in.

my work is the exact opposite of this. there's nothing ambiguous about who this person is, his face is clearly seen, his race, his age group. what is ambiguous is what he is wearing. details of a uniform can be seen, but without looking close it could really be any outfit. there is no camouflage here, in fact the white seems to jump out of the page, begging for attention.

final selection of hi res files

here it is, the final selection in hi res, ready for printing

hi res details

although i wish i had a better (dedicated) negative scanner, i'd say for what i have (35mm slides, flatbed scanner), i've done a pretty good job. i did a 3 pass sharpening workflow: initial sharpening at the original scanned size, sharpening for edge contrast after resizing, then another sharpening to bring out the grain and finer details.

for the selection of the uniform, i used a combination of mostly diagonal lasso at 1.5px feathering, and quick mask for smoothening out the edges.

will take a break from blogging for a bit to concentrate on finishing up these final images

walid raad

there isn't much in common with my work and walid raad's, except for the sense of "cut-out" aesthetics, and maybe the militaristic themes in some of his work. but it's the cut-out, collage look that interests me.

i find the visual effect of it really interesting, when photographs are cut out of their rectangular frame and placed onto a white sheet, or when a whole chunk of a photograph is seemingly cut out to leave a white space in the center

the seemingly three-dimensional world illustrated in the photograph turns into this immense sense of flatness. like the white negates any sort of realism that existed in the photograph, and actually reinforces the acknowledgement that it is a flat, 2-d photograph and not some window into reality.

it's an interesting idea, and it got me looking into notions of the Superflat, and the works of japanese photographer takashi homma. this is a great article about him: http://www.japanexposures.com/2009/12/15/the-burned-field-takashi-homma-and-the-rise-of-superflat/

scanning programs

film scanning really is a complex art in itself, and i've learned that the hard way. after much experimentation with different programs (Silverfast, Vuescan, and Epsonscan) i've found that while Vuescan gave me the best film negative scans, Epsonscan proved much better for slides. the grain seemed sharper and the color was much more accurate. here are comparisons:

Vuescan