Shatter and Flee

Digitally Enhanced Portrait + Matte Painting Background

Matte Painting info: Model photo in the room + buildings stock images + my own stock + Hand Painting [50%]

strobist info: 1 butterlight lightning and 1 side fill.
----- Canon 580 Ex II in shot-through umbrella 45° above the model @1/1 out of the window
----- Nikon sb-26 in shot-though umbrella on the side of model as fill light @1/8
Triggered via Skyport.

Canon 5D Mark II + Canon 16-35mm f/2.8L IS II
Adobe Photoshop CS4 and Wacom Intuos4 Tablet

See How I Made It!

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I spent the last period studying the works of Edward Hopper and better understanding the reason of his creations on canvas.
I rediscovered him being so close to my artistic taste about the topic of solitude and silence that I often portray in my photographs and matte paintings.
I viewed all of Hopper's work and I chose some to be photographically reinterpreted and digitally "extended" as matte paintings.
My main point was to develop an aesthetic and conceptual discourse that could reread Hopper in a modern and original way.
The very first emotion that the american maestro's works have always awaken in me was a huge curiosity of seeing what's "beyond" the painting, over the window or behind a street corner where his subjects are portrayed.
Sometimes I've found some paintings to bee too "tight" and I've always wanted to expand their horizons.
Hopper used to say that he painted what he was feeling, not what he was actually watching. Therefore I decided to extend his paintings and create my "landscapes", those I see with my mind's eyes and the paintings themselves suggest.
If Hopper's realism is anyway surreal for the atmosphere he creates on the canvas, I decided to portray hopper's surrealism though my digital photographic iper-realism.
My concept is to make the subjects' thoughts, fears and hopes reflect in the landscape they are beholding, as an inner projection of their feelings.
Creating a sort of dypthic "landscape-person" where the two elements do not fight each other but where each one is the creation of the other.

A big thanks to my beautiful girlfriend Federica who posed for me. <3