Upswing: A Senior Surreal Photo by Drianne Pantoja (2014)

For my surrealist piece, which I call ''Upswing,'' my focal point was the bright pink butterfly, since that is the final outcome of the hands that look as if they are gradually transforming into something. I had a friend of mine go against a plain white board and use his hand to do different movements, then took images while he went across the entire board, narrowing down my use of hands. I wanted his fingers to represent what would eventually be the wings of the butterfly. I then added the original butterfly layer I took from the web and placed it on each hand, lowering the opacity of the butterfly majorly, and distorting the butterfly to make it fit with the hand for the most part. I added a radial blur to each hand to give it a sort of shaking blur, to make it more obvious that there is metamorphism happening.

The reason why I wanted to use human hands that transform into this insect, is because a butterfly is known to represent joy, hope, resurrection and new beginnings. A butterfly is born as a small caterpillar, then grows and wraps itself in a cocoon, coming out of it as a beautiful creature that flies. Just like a caterpillar we must go through growth and experiences in life to appear as a better person with purpose, and accomplish more than we ever have in our lives thus far. I also thought that hands were not too hard to fit with a butterfly, so this may make my piece not as complicated. Since my background is of a tree, the wood is darker than both the hand and butterfly, but colorwise, closer to matching the hand. Both the wood and hand are different shades of brown so I decided to use one other color that is different than this hue, therefore I used the Split Complementary Relationship color scheme. I really liked the outcome because my focal point is bright hot pink and very sharp after I added the glow effect as well as HDR in Photoshop, which makes it stand out the most.