Sanity

Artist Statement

Just about everyone right now is finding ways to distract themselves from the news, ways to stay in touch with friends, ways to provide an outlet for all of their stress. For everyone, this looks different, and for everyone, there are many different activities that serve this purpose. I know that for me, I wasn’t sure how to capture everything I use to keep myself awake and active during quarantine, so I settled on capturing a few in the photo. I set up near the window in the room where I do my schoolwork (and where I spend a lot of my time on weekdays) to capture the nice weather (the warmth this week has been amazing!). I like having the flowers and other plants in the room with me, so I captured those as well for the purpose of meaning and composition. I included a few colored pencils beside me because in between schoolwork I like to doodle on some of my papers and listen to music. I included my laptop because communication with people is a huge part of how I stay calm in quarantine. Finally, I knew I needed to include my cat, who I spend a lot of time with now as she wanders through the house. She didn’t want to cooperate with the photo and always seemed to walk away from me as soon as the timer I set reached 3-2 seconds, but in a photo burst I managed to get her in the image somewhere!

I wanted to try a few different things for photo editing this time. First, I cropped the image so that the subjects were more clear. Second, I moved the image into Photoshop. None of the filters worked very well with the image so I didn’t use that feature. I did, however, use the paintbrush tool on the color setting to change the color of the wall in the image to red. Before, it was grey, so I wanted the photo to be more bright by changing it. To try and coordinate this with the rest of the image, I used the paintbrush on the color setting on a much lower opacity to change the color of one of the flowerpots closer to red. I also changed the color of the other flowerpots closer to yellow. Finally, I used the burn tool quite a bit—to make the wall look more natural with more shadow, to darken other shadowy areas of the image in comparison to the highlights from the sun, and to make my cat stand out more in the image because the sunlight made her fur very bright, and using the burn tool on certain areas of her fur helped the image look more coordinated. I then moved the image into Photos and made only a few adjustments there—I increased the contrast and brilliance by barely anything, increased the saturation of red and yellow and green slightly while increasing the saturation of blue a lot more, and added a vignette effect and decreased its strength.

The photo didn’t encompass everything I’ve done during my free time during the pandemic, but it captured a few things that help keep me calm. I’ve also been watching quite a few movies, dancing, having long conversations with my sister, listening to music a lot, and more. It’s strange to think that a lot of time has passed since online school began—I’m so used to it by now that it feels like I’ve been doing it all year, but at the same time it’s become harder to keep track of time and I can’t believe it’s lasted this long. Either way, I’m happy that the added free time has at least given me opportunities to do a lot of things that I wouldn’t normally have as much time to do. It really helps considering all of us can’t do other things that we were so used to doing.