We, The Infected

ltroifanatic wrote: ↑

Sat Jan 13, 2018 1:51 am

That scene really brought it home to me.That this movie was something very special.The way she falls not quite fast enough.Her look and demeanor.Everthing about her/him really.I think I fell in love with her in that scene as well.She does look like a little angel the way you've depicted her Sauvin.Really lovely work.Thanks..

I honestly didn't "depict" her. I masked both her and Oskar off, turned down the lights, added some fire to most of the windows, blew in a lot of smoke or fog or something, and then turned up the brightness and contrast on the kids to make them stand out a bit better. The whole overall effect I intended was just to highlight the kids against a moderately depressing background.

Well... smoke DOES get in your eyes, doesn't it? I feel another rant coming on, but it's not quite ready to be lanced just yet, I think. It's a rant that's been gathering mass ever since I struck one of my own images because of a couple of PMs saying it's "skeevy" to use Eli's image in "such a way", even though what I'd depicted was a whole lot of skin and quite literally nothing else - even showing bare, featureless skin where other body parts belong (like, for example, belly buttons). The rant has something to do with something that'd fascinated me some thirty years ago, or so, about the "medium being the message", and it's consonant with other rants I've posted in the past that've touched tangentially on this simple but apparently elusive idea.

Short story: some of the smoke that might be getting in your eyes in this last image, well, you see it (according to theory), but you don't. There are two women wearing huge, billowing dresses in this image, both floating underwater (meaning, the hair, the dresses and everything are everywhere), and one grim reaper. One of the women (actually swimming with her face in the air, but the surface of the water is perpendicular to the image's world plane) is just to Oskar's left, in the tree, the other is more or less midway between the kids. The grim reaper is to Eli's left and the blade of its scythe to her right, either as if guarding her very closely, or about to behead her. In my mind, the swimming women convey an innocent beauty, but the reaper was intended to suggest (subliminally) mortal danger.

I've taken a kind of fascination with this kind of imagery again partly because I could swear I can see things in the movie, but I can't. They're hidden such that my conscious mind can't latch onto them, but the alligator in the back of my head understands these things very, very well, and it can see them. Maybe, if I play around with my own stuff long enough, I'll start seeing what it is I can't see. What I have now that I didn't have even less than a year ago is a means of playing with such things.

For the sake of the easily skeeved, though, I'll make this promise: there'll be deadly plants and animals, there'll be roses and lilacs and cute little koalas, there'll be ancient deities and demons, there'll be some of the horrors of war, and there'll be women and girls of angelic beauty wearing long, flowing robes or dresses (or occasionally maillots), but there will never again be any intentional inclusions that could skeeve out denizens from the Anglosphere. If you should run across any such possible inclusion, you'll have validated the Rorschach test. I say this pre-emptively because you can see all kinds of bizarre things in smoke, clouds, nebulae and other natural phenomena, but the universe didn't put what you see in them - YOU did.

And now, if you'll excuse me, that last cloud looked exactly like a huge, hot, steaming JUICY pile of mashed potatoes almost drowning in a pool of melted butter, and now I'm hungry....

I suspect for most of us WTI denizens, Elvis left the building a long, long time ago.

I'm thinking maybe PeteMork needs to cobble together a few weeks' vacation time and spend it expanding his "meeting of minds" into something we could sink our teeth into...

sauvin wrote: ↑

Mon Jan 15, 2018 3:47 am

I'm thinking maybe PeteMork needs to cobble together a few weeks' vacation time and spend it expanding his "meeting of minds" into something we could sink our teeth into...

Perfect! You're getting better at this all the time.

EDIT: I love the one above, too. "Snow White Eli"

sauvin wrote: ↑

Mon Jan 15, 2018 12:20 am

I suspect for most of us WTI denizens, Elvis left the building a long, long time ago.

I looked up the symbolism of rose colours.Purple is for enchantment and love at first sight.
White is for purity and innocence and also secrecy,reverance and worthiness.Black is the colour of death and farewells but also signifies rebirth and new beginnings.

This one is a straight up experiment, and it looks like crap, so I'll just "imply" that its "intent" is "very badly executed". The foreground is completely untouched apart from the partially masked inset. I found some dried up roses, but that's all they were: dried up roses. I created the fire, some darkened areas and the smoke, and I'm moderately pleased with the result.

As for "thematic intent", heh, I just wanted to play with fire. Burning stuff is different from just throwing up something that looks like fire. Johnny Cash's "Ring of Fire", according to Wikipedia, was written while the Man in Black was busy falling in love with one of his wives, and I thought that setting some roses on fire might symbolise a burning love. In retrospect, as I write these words, I might have stuck these roses between Abby and Thomas with greater effect; theirs was a love that hasn't burned out, but it had most definitely lost its freshness.

Another experiment with blending skulls, skeletons, snakes and spiders into an image. The overall effect I'd intended is "disturbing", but mostly it just turned out "a little weird". There are a couple of layers of swirly fog with different grains because they make it a lot easier to mask things, and I'm finding that clouds aren't the only things you can see big steamy piles of mashed potatoes in.

Edit: the skulls and skeletons are all bent out of shape, blurred and faded. I can see them because I know where they are, but pop this picture up at me this time next week, there's no guarantee I'll be able to find them again.

Another goody Sauvin.Did you do anything to Eli's face?..She looks sort of different and why do I get hungry after your posts?.Reminds me of a T shirt I used to have that read "There's a place for all God's creatures.Right next to the mashed potatoes and gravy" (my apologies to the vegetarians here)..Thanks for sharing.I'm off to get something to eat.