Fine Art Nude: Self-Constraints

It is amazing how we limit our own growth and success by self-imposed constraints: 

• I can't do this. 
• I don't dare do that. 
• I'll never be able to learn. 
• I don't want to learn.

There are ways around it though: 

• Learn and experiment in small steps. 
• Find others who want to learn, and learn with them. 

All the small steps you take will add up. Look back after a year, or two years, and you will see that all the small steps add up to giant strides.

I've had the idea for this picture for a long time. Making it was technically easy. 

I built the scene in DAZ 3D Studio.

I used a Genesis 8 Female 3D model as a base. I positioned the arms and hands, and then duplicated the model. Then I repositioned the arms and hands over the copy.

I bent the neck and tilted the head of the original model. When I did that, the models did not quite match up. Instead of matching the necks and heads precisely, I simply turned the head of the second model invisible.

I created a virtual studio consisting of two planes, a floor, and a back wall. Then I created a rather large third plane, made it a light emitter, and placed it high above, in front of the model, and angled at 45 degrees. This provided ambient lighting for the scene.

Finally, I added a spotlight to put a bit of extra light on the model. I made the spotlight a 2x2 metre square, to soften the shadows.

I rendered the scene with Daz built-in Iray renderer.

I did some post work in Affinity Photo, mostly to hide the intersections between the two 3D models at the shoulders. I used a combination of inpainting and patching.

I increased the contrast a little bit, and turned the picture black and white.

Monolith I and II

Monolith II

The Monolith series is very loosely inspired by the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

If you have seen my other Fine Art Nude work, you know that they are often rooted in some aspect of the human condition. The monolith series is more about form, that is, shape, and light.

I put Monolith II at the top of this blog post, mostly because it is social media safe. (Yes, I occasionally chicken out. Depends more on my current mood, than the pictures.) Reduces the risk of getting banned on Facebook.

Monolith I

Monolith I is more about the light than anything else. I wanted to see what happened when I put a very large light source directly behind the model. If that had been the only light source, you would see little more than a silhouette.

I added another light source in front of the model, angled 45 degrees, and high enoug to illuminate the entire monolith. Because of the distance between the light and the model, the model is evenly lit from head to toe.
 
I did add a bit of shadow in the genital area for modesty's sake. Not the model's modesty (she is a 3D model), or yours, but mine. I am still a bit shy about doing nude art.

Here are links to some of my earlier Fine Art Nude pictures:

• Social Media Bubbles
• The Disciples and the Light
• Perpendicular I
• Triangles IV: Shape and Story

 

Social Media Bubbles

If you think you do not live inside the Matrix, it is because you are asleep inside your bubble.

We all live inside information bubbles shaped by the algorithms that choose what information to give us on social media.

Facebook, Youtube, Google, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, Linkedin...They all use algorithms designed to provide us information we like, and filter out whatever we do not like.

The information we get, shape our perception of the world. Due to the design of the algorithms, the information keeps narrowing down.

The more it narrows down, the more difficult it becomes to understand other viewpoints than our own. Our points of view are whatever the masters of the algorithms design them to be.

If you think you do not live in the Matrix, it is because you are asleep in your bubble.

The Disciples and the Light

I was thinking about how we tend to follow leaders blindly, a lot likes moth drawn to a flame that burns them. Happens in politics, in wars, and in our daily lives, at work, and at home.

This series of pictures is supposed to be relatively tranquil though. The drama is in the light, not in the action. Doing it this way is an important exercise for me, because I usually tend towards making dramatic, action filled pictures. I want these ones to be different. I want to use them to develop a different part of me.

I use a lot of digital composition, so when taking photographs, I often light with that in mind. In this series, I simplify: naked bodies, a naked environment, and very simple light setups.

Last night I wrote down a list of ideas for this series. We'll see how many of them will get done. There are some other projects I am also working on...

Perpendicular I

Have you ever had the feeling that you live on a plane perpendicular to everyone else, even the ones you love?

You can touch, but no matter what you do, you can never share.

Triangles IV: Shape and Story

Triangle IV is a variation on the picture I published a couple of days ago. I have added one element, the man walking towards the woman. I also changed from portrait to horizontal format, I changed the lighten a little bit, and I lowered the viewing angle.

The previous picture was all about form, the triangular composition, the symmetries, and curves. Note how adding the man walking towards the woman changes the picture completely. Now, there is a story there:

The man is walking, so obviously something is happening, but there is more. Why is he walking towards her? Why is he so small? Or, is he normal sized, and she is gigantic? We can't tell. All we can say is that their relative sizes are very different in relation to each other. Without a reference outside the system, we know nothing about the size of either of them.

That's Einstein and relativity, right there.

Actually, there is a reference point outside the system: You, the viewer. When you saw the picture, did you think she was normal sized, or that he was? Or, did you conclude that without a fixed reference point, you can't conclude anything about their sizes in absolute terms?

So, in a way, while the picture itself just is a starting point for your imagination, your reactions to it, and the assumptions you make, can tell you a lot about you.

Because of that, while I have serious doubts about me being anything resembling an artist, I suspect that this picture, may actually be art. It is not because of what it tells you, it is because of the questions it makes you ask.

Triangles and Thelephobia

“Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.”
― Cesar A. Cruz 

How many triangles do you see?

I am fascinated by triangle composition. Fantasy artists like Frank Frazetta often used triangle composition to create striking images for book covers. In photography, it is much less common. In 3d art, I may have seen it once or twice, but no more.

Personally, I am striving to use triangle composition more, because I like the way the eye is drawn to the image. I am still not quite used to it though, so it takes some thought to design pictures that work.

The picture above is a 3D render done with Daz 3D Studio. For this one, I used a Genesis 8 Female 3D model, with some slight modifications.

I built a virtual studio consisting of nothing more than two planes, and added a single light.

The light is a bit interesting. I used a 2x2 m plane, added a light emitting shader, and placed it 3m above the floor the model is sitting on. It was my first try with this kind of lighting, and I am very pleased with it. With a bit of practice, this may well become my preferred method to create studio lighting, and indoor lighting.

It is interesting that you can create professional level studio lighting, with a perfect model, at zero cost.

Perhaps the most interesting thing in the picture above is what you do not see: Nipples.

I cloned them out because of the thelephobic social media rules. (Thelephobia = Fear of nipples.)

If you are thelephobic, please don't look below this line of text, because the uncensored version of this picture is coming up.

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Here they are. Why anyone would find them offensive, I do not understand. Especially considering that male nipples are considered okay to show.

There is a big nipple-related problem though: Social media services, for fear of offending anyone, and thus lose customers, are imposing very strict rules against nudity, and other controversial topics. (Though violence is considered less dangerous, for some unfathomable reason.)

At the same times, they use algorithms designed to feed us more of what we were interested in the last few times we looked at something.

The result is that we get locked into very narrowly defined information bubbles. We are fed only what the algorithms decide we should be fed. We lose diversity, we lose other people's viewpoints.

This inevitably leads to evermore rigid thought control. We are trapped inside rapidly shrinking bubbles. At the end of the process is...nothing. No original thought. No room to be different.

Without variation, no progress is possible.
― Frank Zappa

What follows, eventually, is collapse. The world changes, but we won't, and then we go extinct. Even if our bodies continue to move for awhile, there will be no one there to have an interesting conversation with.

Thelephobia is not the cause, but it is a symptom.


Note about the art quote: The "art should comfort the disturbed..." quote is a variation on a quote by Finley Peter Dunne, and was originally about newspapers. The version about art has been attributed to a number of people, including Banksy. However, as far as I know, Cesar A. Cruz came up with it.