Bethnal Green - Hula Hoop - Chinese White - 299 - Damien Hirst
Task: Create images which combine these seemingly random words together.
After a lot of research into the words I started exploring ways to combine them together by gathering images I liked and then creating numerous paintbruses in Photoshop, so I would have a pallett of images to lace together.
Image 1: I started with this image of a lady holding a hula hoop and put a Damien Hirst splatter painting within the hoop. I then used image blends to put over an image of Bethnal Green gas tower, that I'd taken earlier in the year. I then used a paintbrush I'd made of a parachute as a background to the lady and finished by adding in a necklace of the Chinese symbol for white.
Image 2: I began with the same Hula Hoop lady and then used the magic wand tool to mark round the top half of the image and turned this at an angle. The four grey rectangles are formed from paintbrushes created from a microscopic image of zinc oxide, which is the primary component of the Chinese white pigment. The airplane is a Lockheed Ventura aircraft used by the 299 RAF squadron during the second world war. The butterfly comes from a Damien Hirst print after his exhibition called "In and Out of Love" involving numerous works centered round butterflies. The last image is of Gilbert and George, who are notorious for dining every night in the same cafe in Bethnal Green.
Image 3: This image begun with a quarter of polagraph paper. I then added in an image of Keeling house, a social housing development built in 1957 as a part of Bethnal Green re development. On the side of the building is an image of a hula hooping grandma and a super imposed microscopic image of zinc oxide. The zinc oxide is also added in as bands of texture on the bottom left hand corner. The Lockheed Ventura appears again and from this drop parachutes, as the 299 RAF regiment was involved in delivering supplies by paratchute. Attached to the parachutes are the Damien Hirst diamond encrusted skull "For the Love of God".
Image 4: This was a very simple image which started again with the polar graph paper on a green background. Using paintbrushes I added in the hula lady, Keeling house, short stirling bombers (another aircraft used by the 299 RAF squadron) and formed the zinc oxide image into clouds. Over this I put in a big diamond to link to the Damien Hirst diamond skull.
Image 5: This image was enclosed in the diamond shape to symbolise Damien Hirst, which is added on by including the "For the Love of God" skull and the coloured dots from another of his works. On the right side is an image of the Charles Boothe Life and Labour map of London from 1886-1903, which highlighted Bethnal Green as an area of extreme deprevation. Again we have the zinc oxide texture on the top side areas, hula hoopers in the middle and Short Stirling planes for the 299 regiment.
Image 6: I started with the polargraph paper again and decided to form everything in cirles. So we have another microscopic image of zinc oxide, a parachute form the 299 squadron, the Kray twins (who were from Bethnal Green) and some hula hoopers. In the center is the Damien Hirst diamond skull.
Image 7: This was an experimentation with using the lasso tool and utilising it to section off areas on which to overlay images. So in the grey area I have a background texture of zinc oxide, image of Keeling House and Short stirlings in the sky with parachutes. In the green section I put in the hula hoop image. The coloured dots are a Damien Hirst piece.
Image 8: The starting point for this was a street scene of a row of slums in Bethnal Green. From this I added in a hula hooping cat, zinc oxide texture on the pavement, Damien Hirst dots over the sky and on the little girls dress and then the Lockheed Ventura bomber in the sky dropping a paratrooper.
