World of One: Paradox 2.0

I thought I could do better, and I believe I have. This is "Paradox 2.0." You could say the image I shared in my last post was like the prototype for this one. I meant to show this earlier this week but it took me a lot longer to put this together than I thought it would.

When I went back to the drawing board after making the first "Paradox," I realized I what I thought was missing was the movement/drama in my composition that you see in the other World of One pictures. The day that we went to go shoot, I also decided that I was sick of looking at the same kind of background and picked a different location for the shoot (this one is by Chinatown).

Special thanks to my buddy Ivan for pressing the button and for helping with the shoot!!! I wouldn't have been able to do it without you. Check back in a few days, the next naruto/ninja inspired picture in this series is already in the works.

On Failure

The road to success is paved in failure. These are words that I firmly believe in. Pretty much all my heroes these days attribute epic failures as an integral part of their successes. For me, this image was a complete fail. But as a result, I learned much more about myself from this image, than any of the others I've created in this series. I put close to three days worth of work into this picture, and when I was finished, it was the most complicated image I had ever put together. But for one reason or another I was just not that into it, and promptly decided it was a failure. It's not that I thought this image was bad, but I knew I could make it better. I knew that there was something missing from it that made me not like it.

The image I'm working on right now, is the 2.0 version. It's already crashed on me once (never happened to me before), wiping out over an hour's worth of work. I was livid, but now I know that when this is done I can be proud, and it'll all be worth it.

World of One: Focus

We don't all look the same!!! Except when we all look the same...

My ideas for these projects are starting to build off one another. At first I wanted to just mess with the configurations of the different figures (for some reason I never think of the guys in these images as myself) but I think I will start to do more of these imaginary instillations in other areas now too. I've started using the term "imaginary instillations" probably because people look at me like I'm crazy when I'm shooting them, and also because they don't really exist except in the reality I've created with my pictures. The more of these I do, the more technically savvy I feel like I am becoming. Each one is has become increasingly more complex than the last. As a good friend of mine would say "Progression is here!!!"

I just finished shooting another one of these earlier this week, and will be putting it together later today. I'm starting to get restless with this project, not because I think what I'm doing is not worthwhile, but more because I want to start working on some other projects, but this one eats up so much time. My drawings thus far have been a fail, but I think i'm gonna start drawing more stuff that I like, and actually take some time to make it good. It makes a huge difference when I actually try, but for some reason or another (laziness...mostly laziness) I sometimes don't.