For my Sustained Investigation piece 7, I continued with my questions of "How have the different decades/eras of the past changed and influenced life today? How does life differ today from life back then?" For this piece I decided to go a little out of order and focus on the 20's. I took a lot of inspiration for this piece from The Great Gatsby and aesthetic of the roaring 20s.
First I started by finding a picture of animated eyes that were inspired by the eyes on the cover of The Great Gatsby. I really like that these eyes give the piece a good color and reflect the sort of "gilded age" and emptiness of the 20s as well. I also decided to add some fireworks behind the eyes to show the celebration and party culture of the era.
Next, I blended the fireworks behind the eyes using a layer mask and brush tool and by turning down the opacity of the eyes to let the fireworks give the piece a more layered and exciting effect. Next, I started blending the eyes into the black background of the piece to prepare for my next step. I added a black background to the piece because I felt like the white created too much of a contrast and the eyes blend better with the black. Overall, my inspiration for putting the eyes at the top of this piece was to show the empty eyes looking down on the rest of the piece which will exemplify the party culture of the decade.
After blending the eyes, I changed the color to be black and white because I felt like the blue was out of place and didn't fit well in the color palette with the rest of the piece. I also decided to change the fireworks image to fit the entire piece because I like how the eyes were blended into the fireworks with the black background.
After adding the fireworks, I added a ceiling that I found on the internet that shows the glamorous aesthetic of the decade. I put the ceiling behind the fireworks so that I could still have the fireworks blended into the ceiling but still have the details and extravagance of the ceiling show through to the rest of the piece. I really like how the ceiling has a gold aesthetic that provides a contrast with the dull and black and white eyes at the top of the piece.
Finally, I added in a black and white image of a man holding a glass and potentially toasting a person or an event, I like how it is up to the viewer to decide what they think is happening in the piece. Originally, I was going to try and use a champagne glass tower on the bottom of the image, but non of the pictures online matched the aesthetic. Once I found the man and the glass, I ended up liking that much better than my original plan because of the sense of mystery that it gave the piece.
Here is my final piece:
