My artwork "extraterrestrial getaway" is a surreal digital media collage of a retro-inspired resort located in titan, one of Saturn's many moons. For this assignment, I chose an analogous warm colour scheme. To play into the surreal aspect, I used various hues of yellow, orange, pink, red and red-violet. I wanted to create a desert-like atmosphere, Surrealist art focuses on creating something dreamlike and unrealistic but making it look realistic. I used my colour scheme to further focus on this point.

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To create the artwork I used my iPad Pro, Apple Pencil, and Procreate. As I am familiar with this material of art, I felt that it was easier for me to use different features and adjustments to create my goal I added in overlays in my image to subtly create texture. I used a water overlay set on multiply in the pool water, along with an overlay across the whole image to give it a grainy look, that gave my artwork a vintage postcard feel. I experimented with the liquify tool, I used it to make the melting of the eye and sun, along with the waves in Saturn. The liquify tool is not something I usually use but I enjoyed playing around with it and using it to create movement in my artwork. Although it was challenging at first to figure out what images I wanted to use and how I should compose my art piece, I had fun using a more familiar media and exploring some new techniques and tools to incorporate in my art.

 

I found my inspiration for this art piece I follow on Instagram use an art style that uses cutouts of vintage magazines to create surreal collages. I used this as an opportunity to experiment with an art medium that I've always been interested by. With my main source of inspiration figured out, I expanded my ideas from there to create my current composition. For my main concept, I drew inspiration from an assignment I made in grade 6. We were instructed to design a vacation getaway to any of the planets in our solar system and write a paper about it. I used this assignment to bring one of my old ideas to life. With my two ideas combined, I decided to pursue a retro-futuristic aesthetic. I used digital copies of vintage magazines from the 1960s along with some current-day photos that I edited to make them blend in with the rest of the pictures.

 

My goal for this artwork was to better familiarize myself with digital art and incorporate some of my past knowledge with current techniques we've been taught throughout art this year. I was given a lot of freedom making this, and as I stated before I was a bit overwhelmed I also really enjoyed the theme of surrealism, surrealist art has always been one of my favourite art movements and I felt that this was a good opportunity to try it out and put my own twist on it. Overall I feel happy with how this turned out, I like the colour scheme that I chose and the overall idea, even if It did diverge from my original sketch. Although I feel my image has surrealistic concepts, I feel that I may have limited myself in ideas for the purpose of making it look good and cohesive. Next time I wish to be able to fully explore my ideas in order to truly make a surrealistic image. Out of everything we've learnt so far, I feel that this was one of my favourite things to create, I wish to continue using surrealism and digital media in my future artwork