Maisie Cousins
Maisie Cousins, is a London-based photographer whose stimulating images explore the relationship between the beautiful and the grotesque with a visceral rawness. To make her art stand out, she uses bold and exotic hues. She takes a lot of close-ups of the face, particularly the eyes and lips. Cousins uses a lot of vivid colors like baby blue and hot pink. Feminism is at the heart of most of her work; her most renowned piece was titled "what are girls made of." The colors in her art are what stand out to me the most; the variety of hues in her work makes it very exciting and enjoyable to look at. The samples below will serve as inspiration for me when I make my own photographs. I believe the artists intended for this piece to highlight women's anxieties, such as acne and hair. Her plan is to make this more usual. If I could ask her one question I would ask her behind the meaning and reasoning of her work's titles. for most of her work she uses a high aperture, this makes the whole image in focus and sharp. she uses high key artificial lighting, this creates a bright light and helps to see all of the skin texture and specific details. there are mainly organic shapes present as the artist is trying to pursue the natural look of the models' features.
Photoshoot Plan
This plan is going to help me mainly for my first edits, however it can be my basis to my other two developments. for my photoshoot i will be using colored face masks and sticking flowers onto my face. and i will be adding some elements of water as well. i will be creating this photoshoot in my house as i need someone else to take the pictures for me. this photoshoot plan will mainly help for more technical aspects.
Contact Sheet
my photoshoot was not that successful. this was because when i was using the face mask to color my skin i could not stick the flowers onto my face anymore. also the face mask created a confusing texture which does not resemble the images. i have decided to annotate my contact sheet, i have done that by putting crosses and circles. the crosses mean that the pictures are unsuccessful or there is something wrong, which means that i would not like to use them. however the circles are to point out the ones why came out the best and which one i will definitely want to use in my edits. some are unsuccessful because of the lighting or the writing or the background or just any technical problems and also sadly because of the face mask.
these are my first developments. i made these by taking pictures with flower attached to my face with lash glue. some of them i left like this but some of them i used photoshop to edit them a little bit. for the edited ones i selected everything but the flowers so i could turn it black and white. then, if needed, i changed the hue. for further developments i will use these images to do some double exposure and also bring back some sawing from previous artists.
Initial Edits
Highlighting Success
these are my favorite pictures, i really like them as they are well edited and i liked the positioning of the small flowers. i also think that they resemble the artist's pictures with my own twist.
Second Development
Contact Sheet
for this second development i used almost the same images, this is because for the second development i decided to make some double exposure with the skin being black & white and the flowers being colorful. the circles on my contact sheet show the successful and good images and the crosses show the ones which i think are less good and i dont want to use on my website. some are more successful than others as they display the flowers better and the overall composition is better.
Edits
these are my second developments. i used the same images from my initial edits (that is why i do not have a second contact sheet) and selecting everything apart from the flowers so that only they would have colour and then turned the saturation for everything else to 0. after this i either left them like this or i double exposed them.
Highlighting Success
these are my favorite as they are very technical and also i really liked the colors together. finally, i really liked even the ones which have minimum difference.
Third Development
this is my third development, i took pictures from my first and second development, then i printed pictures of flowers onto tracing paper and sewed the onto the other paper. this is somewhat similar to the initial artist and it also links to the other two previous artist i have developed prior. to improve i could use a wider variety of patterns and stitching methods.
Highlighting Success
these are my successes. i particularly like these as they turned out well, they have my own spin on the artist's work and also it is something somewhat different to the other sewing developments which i have completed for the other artists.
