Thursday, September 10, 2015

Renaissance Faire depictions, modern day meets the olde world

Sunglasses
© 2015
(at a Renaissance Faire)

If you followed my last two blogs, you know that I took photos for a flag day parade which resulted in transforming one photo into an art piece called "Followers as Zombies", and I took some photos at a Beltane festival in the dark which resulted in an art piece called "Bacchanalian Freak Show with Hieronymus Bosch Treatment."

One reason I took so long to get the Renaissance Faire photos together to post is that I've been working on many different treatments of them (and still not done).

So, for the first batch, these are themed: modern day meets with the olde world.

The first of them are these ladies with sunglasses. All of them are wearing them, so that was lucky, perfect!

I thought maybe this was the best "statement photo" of the Renaissance Faire shoot too.

Maybe I can't do better than this. 

Or can I?

So, I looked at this photo of a dance at the Sca tent and saw more possibilities:

The Dance II
(preliminary)
© 2015

It's an okay photo. Nothing great. It looks kind of confusing. I've always liked compositions like this, though, where the activity is framed by two figures. Another scene is going on at the top of the photo where a family seems to be gathering on a hill. But the major theme, again, is that the modern day is in with the olde world. 

So I try to give the olde world figures a different kind of treatment than the modern day ones. This is the final result:

 The Dance II
(final)
© 2015

This isn't the most creative thing I've done, though. There are a lot of photographers who emphasize certain figures in this way. But it satisfied me for this particular photo. 

Then I thought I'd try another one. Again, I gave most of the photo a muted look and brightened up the sippy cup. And indeed, this photo is called "Sippy Cup":

 Sippy Cup
© 2015

If you are wondering what I am going to do with the works from the last three posts, I decided to show digital art and art photography in local gallery shows as very few people are working in this medium in my area. There are too many paintings! 

I always like to go in a different direction than the mainstream.

In my area, no one was doing Renaissance music with a creative approach either. Instead of being a woman blues singer in the 1990s like so many others here, I decided to head off in my own direction. While I found that the gigs were limited  to grant funded concerts, the Renaissance music CD got exceptional interest, and for the first few years, sales for them were phenomenal, at least compared to others I had done of more mainstream music styles. I hope to do another Renaissance CD some day. I spent years making some great arrangements of tunes I love.