Open Call:: GIF the Portrait Project!

Welcome to the GIF the Portrait Project!

 I’m an artist and a professor of art here in NY. I love generating animated GIFs. Not only for my own work, but I also love introducing this process to my students, colleagues and friends. I am partnering with my friends over at Giphy.com on this project. If you don’t know @giphy then you best head over to their site now to establish your new awareness!

The images below are the result of two single images. Pablo Picasso and Kurt Schwitters are two of my favorite artists (Andy Warhol as well, but we will get back to him later) I wanted to use them as inspiration for a series of collage based  works. These are the first few pieces from my experiments. Each piece is sized at 8.5 X 11. inches. The desire to create a series like this came from my interest in a series of works created by the students of artist and professor Javier Cambre. Cambre is a friend and one of my colleagues at CUNY QCC. I later re-designed my interpretation of the works to fit into a project for myself, as well as my students. I have been teaching 2D design at the college level for 9 years. It is a course that I love to teach. I also enjoy intuitively expanding the course content and the class projects. The course allows for students to learn manual and analog techniques, as well as basic graphic design skills. This gives us a lot of options as we focus on understanding the elements of art, and the principles of design. As you may know, the vastness of how this language can be applied is…..endless!  I’m  currently working with my classes by collaborating on a series of the works by animating them. Thats right, we are going to GIF the Portraits!

In this project you will be re-organizing a representational image into a more subjective one or by creating a hybrid.  The image selected should be a portrait. (The image should also be a high enough resolution to re-copy and scale to larger or smaller sizes, but then again, if you wish to include texture as an aspect of the work, sky is the limit) You as the artist can decide what a portrait is. Is it a human? Is it an anime character? Is it your dog or cat? Hmmm. You will need at least 6-10 copies of your image to start with, you can make multiples by using a photo-copy machine or a printer. Or you can simply use adobe photoshop to copy, paste and layer variations of the image.

You will be re-creating 3-6 subjective variations of your portrait.

After manually or digitally generating 3-6 variations, pick your favorite image to GIF. But why stop there? After you create your first contrast, you may want to make more, and more, and more! (sinister music begins to play)

1.  Manipulate the existing image by cutting out several parts and pieces (this includes the individual facial features, head, back round, neck, & clothing areas) You may use your scissors or x-acto knife to cut out your forms, or you can use the lasso and crop tools in photoshop to save and create individual layers.

2.  Measure and create 3-6 blank picture planes to work on. I suggest keeping these between 8.5×11 and or a  bit smaller. Either way, they will need to be resized for the web and minimized to about 3×5 inches and 72 dpi for tumblr. Yep, we will be archiving this project on Tumblr. If you are unsure of HOW to resize your work, don’t worry, We will do it for you if necessary.

3.  Lay out the cut pieces in front of you. You will then re-organize and compose your pieces into 3-6 different compositions. All 3-6 of the final works should be subjective and or hybrid images. Or perhaps another  “such-ness or potential     is-ness” you may define that as well.

4.  Scan, photograph, and save your final outcomes.

5. Chose 2-3 of the outcomes that you like the most and animate them by generating a GIF(s). Save your GIF work for the web. Meaning, a .gif file. If you need assistance on this, shoot us an e-mail. We will help.

6. E-mail the analog still images and the GIF files to us by using the address on this blog.  Ryan (@) ryanseslow.com

We will post the works here and via @giphy on an ongoing basis.

“Andy Picasso” another re-arrangement series

by Ryan Seslow

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