Surrealism Photography

In this lesson, you will learn how to create a surreal piece of art using your photographs and images off the Internet. Firstly, you will learn what surrealism is, then you will take a few photographs and find some images on the Internet. Finally, you will edit them together into one surreal picture.

This lesson is in three parts:

Part 1 - What is Surrealism?

Part 2 - Take photographs and find images off the Internet

Part 3 - Edit the photographs together to create a surreal artwork

WAGOLL

Below are some examples of the surreal artworks you could create following these tutorials. Click on the 'student examples' link to see real student creations.

Part 1 What is Surrealism?

Surrealism is a type of art that tries to release the creative potential of the unconscious mind. Have you ever had a dream where something completely unreal has happened? Something that could never ever possibly happen in real life? Now imagine you create an image of that dream to show people what your dream was about. That image would be an example of Surrealism art.

Surrealism is about the juxtaposition of objects, people and places etc into situations that would not occur in reality. A levitating child floating over a sea of cats. A gigantic woman trying to leap over a tower block. This is definitely something we can create with photography and editing. Characteristics of surrealism apply the following principles:

Juxtaposition (the fact of two things being seen or placed close together with contrasting effect)

Scale (objects too big or too small to be real)

Levitation (objects appearing to float)


  1. Before we start, do a Google image search for 'surrealism' and 'surrealism posters'. Look through the images.

  2. Have a look at the surrealist artwork of Merve Ozaslan, Max Ernst and Julien Pacaud to name a few.

Save your favourite surreal picture to your device. Describe what is it about the image that makes it surreal?

Part 2 - Taking photographs

There are two things you need to do in this part:

  • Take a selection of your own photographs.

  • Find some other images off the Internet.


It is important at this stage to have an idea of what you want to create so you can find and take images that will work. Once you do, take a selection of photographs of a variety of different things. These could be of objects such as cups, chairs, people, animals, plants etc.

To make your images easier to edit in part 3, it is very important to take photographs of objects and things with a plain background. The background doesn't have to be white, but it does have to be plain. For example, the first image of hands below, has far too much going on in the background. It will be very hard to edit this later on. If you can you should move your object to a plain background and take the photograph there instead.

Background too busy. This will hard to edit in part 3.

A plain background will be much easier to edit in part 3.

Part 3 - Edit the photographs together to create a surreal image

By now you should have taken a variety of your own photographs and found a selection of images off the Internet. If you need to you can use mine that can be found in the resources section below.

  1. Watch this YouTube video which shows you how to edit your found images and photographs together. You will learn how to use the magic wand tool, eraser tool and layers. https://youtu.be/yBmnpdipfY8

  2. Create a surreal image. This could be of anything you like. Giant cats sitting on the top of tall building, a dolphin diving into a glass of water, a toy car driving on the moon. It is entirely up to you. You can create an image on anything you want!

  3. Save your completed image as a JPEG to your device.

Resources

Below are a variety of copyright free images that you can save to your device and use if you need to. They are either photographs I have taken or they are copyright free from Pixaby.com.