The Winged Heart

So, today is a funny post!  I’ve been a member at the art website deviantART for many many years now, and they’re hosting a Tim Burton Alice in Wonderland contest!  The contest is to submit a piece of art which is yourself as a character from the new Alice in Wonderland movie!  I was very excited to hear about this because I’ve been looking for a reason to cosplay the White Queen.  I’ve also been looking for a reason to buy a DSLR camera!  So we went and bought my first DSLR (Canon Rebel T2i EOS 550D), which I am super pumped about, but then I proceeded to shuffle my feet regarding the contest, convincing myself that there was no point in entering since I wouldn’t win, and I didn’t know how to use my camera yet, and I didn’t have a white wig to be a proper White Queen.  My husband told me to stop making excuses, haha.  And then he was gone for half the day today, so I took the opportunity to put on a bunch of makeup, move around all the bedroom furniture to make a backdrop with the black underside of our box springs, and take a bunch of artsy photos of myself!

I tried to channel what I thought would be a younger White Princess, maybe super vain and self-absorbed from being brought up as the favorite child.  I messed around with a big mirror, trying to get something meaningful and cool-looking.  Then I just tried to do some close-ups.  Then the key charm of my lock and key necklace fell off, so I decided to use it as a prop!  In the end, one of the key shots looked nice, so I proceeded to go crazy with it in Photoshop!  Photoshop makes everything look amazing.  So here are my two entries:

The Key to Wonderland

The White Queen

I was very embarrassed to show Nick all the photos I had taken.  He got home while I was still shooting, and poked his head in the room wanting to watch, but I kicked him out.  It feels so embarrassing and narcissistic to take artsy photos of yourself, haha!  But I think it’s something I need to get over, because I am happy with how the photos turned out!  There are a lot of bad-looking spots though, especially my elbow, where the changes I made in Photoshop didn’t turn out so well..  and the image looks totally different on Nick’s nice new monitor, so I feel kind of helpless for getting it to look exactly how I want it.  And some of the poor quality is just due to the fact that I have no idea how to use my camera!  I’m also not crazy about my photoshopped white hair, but I like it (and the implication of more white hair due to the cropping) better than leaving in my short brown hair.

And for fun, to see the power of Photoshop, here is the original photo!

Pretty amazing, right?  This was a fun project and I’m glad I just went ahead and did it instead of feeling down and defeated before I even tried.  I feel like I learned a lot about my camera, and found some things I need to learn more about.  It’s also really really fun to see myself with such an extreme look (and perfect porcelain skin, haha)!  Compared to some of the other entries, mine looks pretty generic and boring, but I think it’s at least nice to look at and I’m pleased with the results!  I did the best I could with the resources/space I had, haha.