Evaluation

In this project I have photographed fashion, portraits and items that are connected to gambling. This has included dresses, playing cards, poker chips, bracelets with dice on it and characters from popular culture that are based on characters in a pack of cards. Looking at my final pages and cover it looks like a representation of gambling as a physical form of fashion.

My first ideas were sketched out into a notebook that I scanned in. this showed ideas like a card dress, dice in between teeth, face painting card suits, pouring water into a glass of dice and ice and intricate designs to be incorporated with the suits of the cards. However I only pursued two of these ideas. The card dress and the pouring of water. I also had the idea of someone throwing a card towards the camera and catching the card in detail and the model out of focus. I pursued this as well however in consideration after all the images were taken it did not match the style of the other images I took. Therefore I would not use it even though it is a strong image.

Whilst researching relevant practitioners I came across Kirk Quilaquil who had drawn an image of an unhappy jester holding playing cards which was very contradictory to the traditional jester stereotype. This influenced me greatly and I photographed my model with a face paint design that I had developed. this greatly resembled a character from Batman comics called Harley Quinn. I believe that she was based on the queen of diamonds because of the traditional design of her to have diamonds on her costume. These images then influenced my cover image because of the contrast in tone and the grungy theme.

To take all these images I used my own camera and lens'. This includes Nikon D610, 50mm f/1.4 and 24-85mm f/3.5-4.5. I then used many different techniques using Photoshop. I used some methods that are often used in the fashion industry like liquify and warp grids to shape and mold the models bodies to make them more attractive and reflective of professional practice.

I only had one problem. I didn't do all the research that I needed to do in time. This meant that the images were all taken in a very short timespan which I found quite stressful because I didn't have that much time to edit and reshoot if it was going to be needed. However I found that I didn't need to reshoot so I only had to worry about editing.

A big influence was Kirk Quilaquil who created the image of the jester. This influenced ideas that lead on to Harley Quinn, the face paint and clothing design. Rezarta Shkurta was another great influence because of the female biting the card and large contrast in tones.

I am very pleased with the cover I have created, it looks professional and official which is what I have tried to achieve. I am also pleased with the first of the double page spreads because it is very simple and to the point. The card dress represents card games like poker and blackjack, the models positioning and expression shows the fear of losing and the quote puts a lot of pressure on the image again reflected by the model. I am pleased with the second double page spread however I don't feel that it is as strong as the others because of the amount of white on the page and the amount of wording used to fill this area.

If I was to do this unit again I would complete the research faster and give myself more time to develop and experiment with face painting and body painting. This may give me more images to work with and make my second page stronger.