Surreal Self Portraits

Essential Question: What skills are necessary to be able to create a surreal self-portrait using your camera and PhotoShop?

Purpose:

• To express yourself using the concepts of surrealism;

• To learn about surreal artists such as Salvador Dali, Renee Magritte, and Frida Khalo and contemporary photographers: Rachel Baran, Laura Williams, and Manu Pombrol;

• To continue to explore advanced Photoshop tools to create a seamless, convincing surreal self-portrait.

In order to be able to create a surreal self-portrait using your camera in PhotoShop you have to know how to set the lighting up on your camera manually to ensure that clear pictures of yourself are being captured. Then once they are uploaded onto Photoshop you have to understand the essential tools that are available on the platform. For example, in both of my surreal self-portraits, I used the quick selection tool to select parts of each image I wanted to show up then used the quick mask tool to make a cleaner selection of the subjects I wanted in my final picture. Then I used the eraser tool to tune up the needed areas. My second portrait involved a lot more editing. There are actually two pictures creating the mountain valley look. In order to match them I had to use the dodge tool to brighten the background image and I made several layers in order to make the connection look seamless. Then the rest of the process was very similar to the first picture where the most important tools I used were the quick selection tool, the eraser tool, the quick mask tool, and the crop tool.