Feb. 6

It typically isn't something I listen to, but tonight I decided to take a look at Nine Inch Nails video for "The Perfect Drug". The video has always fascinated me and I love the aesthetic of it. It has that creepiness that I've been gravitating towards lately. The theme that i'm seemingly leaning towards right now has to do with inner demons, and I think this video expresses that in a very interesting way. Just watching it has the power to put me in a completely somber mood. I don't necessarily want my work to do the same, but I think the inspiration I get when i'm in a somber mood ends up coming through my work in a much more thoughtful way. I'm not striving to have a whole lot of meaning behind my work, aesthetics is what i'm mostly going for. We'll see where it takes me though.
I also revisited Mark Ryden's website for the first time in a while. For some reason I felt like I needed to take in his work again. Not necessarily to start drawing directly from it again, but to try and regain the inspiration he gave me.
I miss building sets, but lately i've been realizing how much it is to take on building a set. There are so many details to think about, it's stressful. Not to mention expensive. I always try to buy things that I can return but I either mess them up too much to return, or just procrastinate and never return them because i'm a packrat. I took a long walk through a antique store out by staples mill and found so much amazing stuff! Very expensive amazing stuff though......that I could never afford. It would be so amazing if they just locked me in there for a night and let me take photographs of everything. I think that might be my biggest problem this semester. I want to make more elaborate settings but it just takes so much! I'm afraid I won't be able to come up with eight different pieces in this time period. I feel like i'm pretty gung-ho on doing the set thing though....I need to do it.
Well I don't have a good ending....I'm going to sleep.

Feb.3

I have a shoot coming up on the 24th that I am currently preparing for. I'm throwing around a couple of ideas on what the set is going to look like. The theme is going to be centered around the color red and self loathing. What i am envisioning right now is a dark red set, with flowing red curtains that surround a mirror as well as a simple table(with reddish tones) and a red chair(Depending on what I can find) and of course the model will be wearing a red dress. I was planning on working with highly saturated images this semester but I wasn't really thinking of using red until the model that i'm using for this shot suggested wearing her red wedding dress. I've been toying with the thought of either using a whole lot of red in the image, or using a white set with just the dress being the only colored thing, but i'm pretty sure i'm going to use a lot of reds. The only thing i'm worried about is how this image will work with future images in this series since red is such an attention grabber. We'll see how it goes...

As far as photographers that i've been looking at, i've stumbled upon a few. Most notably a photographer named Andrea Giacobbe. I couldn't find much information on her, but I really like her work. Most of her shots are very fashiony and surreal. She has some of the strangest photographs i've ever seen but a lot of them caught my attention. I like her use of color and the locations she chooses for her photographs. I think her images are similar to what I want to achieve because they are aesthetically pleasing but have a strange twist to them that is a bit unsettling. These are the two photographs of hers that I think most pertain to the ideas that I have for my upcoming shoot.