April / Self-portrait, COVID19 (Patreon)

We may be stuck inside, but this was a great little stress reliever and helped me feel productive during all of this. I created this set entirely in the living room of my apartment, but I would say a lot of the magic did come from post production work.

I have a small little backdrop set up, so I fixed that up against a wall in my living room and draped two different types of fabric around it; if you look closely, you may can see that behind the sparkly bright red fabric, there is a dark pomegranate color of fabric. I used the dark shade as the main piece and tried to drape the bright red fabric around it to resemble theatre curtains (or something similar, just to bring some nice elegance to the piece).

I had bought the bodychain I am wearing off of Etsy for my west coast tour... but we see how well that ended up. I thought it really fit the regal vibes of this set, so I incorporated it. I tried to have messy artistic red makeup, but it did not translate fully on camera. Because of this, I decided to play with "makeup" in photoshop. See the few images with a thick red lines painted across my eyes? All photoshop! I used a normal red brush tool and then played with the panel over on the layers section; it starts at "normal" but has a drop list for different types of blending modes like screen, burn, lighten, et cetera. I skimmed through until I found one suitable, created a layer mask, and applied the "makeup"!

If you'd like to see me do any of these things in real time, let me know and I will make a tutorial.

Let me know your thoughts on these. Would you have guessed I did this in my living room?

I also lost my tripod, so after my partner gave up on helping me, I stacked my camera on top of a pack of paper towels and coasters to get the rest of the shots.... lol. Creativity! Ingenuity! 

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Self-portraits during the pandemic
Dahlonega, Georgia 2020