People, Light, Fabric and Texture

I have completed my Advanced Studio Lighting class and I am delighted to say that I did well in my final critique. In the last two studio sessions, I found myself exploring the theme of people and fabric. (You can take the woman out of Textiles but you cannot take textiles out of the woman?!)

The first of these two sessions was a Figurative Nude class.

Ahem. For the general consumption purposes of my blog and Flickr, this image is probably the only one that is safe for me to share. It is a bit dark but it does illustrate the theme that I was starting to explore i.e. the way that fabric changes light, form and adds texture to what you see.

My second studio sesssion was with Erica. Now, I did warn Erica in advance that I planned to wrap her in fabric - just because I was a bit nervous that she might think me a complete weirdo. To my utter relief, she just burst out laughing and said, 'Toga Party!'

So, without further ado, here are some of my Erica 'Toga Party' portraits:

For fun, I converted the top image into a negative image. I love how this appears to changes the very soft image into something hard and alien - almost like a x-ray of chiffon thrown over a marble statue:

So, once we had conquered Rome, I did my best to move us forwards through time to 17th Century Holland:

I think that this might be my favourite image. The effect of the lighting and the fabric in this picture reminds me a little bit of Johannes Vemeer's 'Girl with a Pearl Earring'. The above picture is sort of intended to go with this next picture:

The narrative idea behind these two pictures is a kind of 'before' and 'after'. Through a fabric screen: unaware of being observed and aware of being observed.

The next three images are a continuation of this theme but concentrating a little more on texture and form through fabric. Amongst a number of other things, Erica is a talented florist. So I included flowers in a few of her portraits as a reference to her skills:

Please click here for the full slide show of Erica's photoshoot. I really enjoyed creating these pictures and I would love to explore this theme further. So I am hoping that this session did not creep Erica out too much and that she will agree to model for me again soon!