1. My message in this photo was "When you abuse a person, they die out" specifying women in this case. The meaning behind the ocean is that sometimes the ocean can seem calm and composed but it's actually rough and stormy, representing the "abuser". The reason I had my model suspended in the air and dissolving was because she's just falling into their grasp (the hands) like she has no choice, and she's so broken pieces of her are dissolving away.
2. At the start of this project I knew exactly what I wanted to do. Taking the idea from a previous sketch I had done and tweaked it. It took me 3 sketches to decide which composition looked best, and in the end I didn’t completely go with my design.
Next I started looking for pictures and once I found a satisfying picture of the ocean I started shooting.
I got some hand models and set the lighting to the tone of the background and took my pictures. I only used only the best photo that I took.
After I went to photoshop and cut the hands out of the background, placed them on a separate layer, positioned them then refined the edge and created a new layer with masks.
Once I was happy with that I took a picture of my model suspended on chairs but then cut out the chairs and the background then put her on the final picture, placed her in the sky and "dissolved" her. Then I played around with positioning for a while until I deemed it done. The way it changed from the original plan was I was supposed to have a hand holding onto my model but it looked nicer without it.
3. I learned a couple things in the making of this project. For one I learned how to make a picture smaller, because before this project I couldn't figure it out for the life of me (you have to press shift and then drag the corners) I also learned that if you press dissolve and change the opacity on a subject more and more pixels disappear. It's also very hard to crop the background from smaller spaces. But I learned to fix my mistakes.
