“I had a dream last night. I was dancing the White Swan.”.

-Black Swan(2010)

These are what I picked out when I was searching for visuals relating to the quote:

Dreams, sleeping, swans, and girls dancing, ballerinas. 

Eventually I came up with these compositions…

After asking Ms Ina what she thought about those, I decided to just choose one out of these. I think they’re somewhat similar so I can’t pick them all out at once.

Sample 1 was out of the picture because the head was being chopped off and Ina didn’t like that lol. But what I liked about this one is putting a swan in the ballet shoe. I like to merge pictures together , so I thought it’d be nice to fit the swan inside the shapes, so that there’s meaning behind it. Swan + ballet shoe = dancing the White Swan, as portrayed in movie!

It was fun making Sample 2 because I loved the 3 dancing ladies. I didn’t want to put them around the shoe or elsewhere because I think it’d be a bit “off”. Again, I merged them with the ballet shoes and put them somewhere in there. Overall, not as simplistic as Sample 1 and it’s very literal.

Similarly, Sample 3 was done the same as previous. I guess I wanted to add a bit of depth to the composition. I just double the sleeping lady, and changed the way the ladies are put in.

 

 

Done some more research and googled “old engravings stages”. I wanted to add a setting so there’s a base I could work on. I did some silkscreen printing on the previous 3 samples, but there something I didn’t like about the outcome. It was kinda meh…..

 

 

So, after much photoshopping, I came up with these. They’re my finals.

I tried to use emphasis on the 2 dancers, through the use of scale. By upping the scale a bit, it will focus your attention more on them as the main people in the  picture. Sincee there’s this mirror effect going on with the 2 ladies, I had to choose a background that is similar as well. Something like Symmetry.

The movie Black Swan had characters where dancer would dress as either White or Black Swan. And their ballet costumes from their tutu to their masks and their hairclips all resembled to that of a swan. So with Photoshop, I played around with the head of a swan and overlap it on the subjects’ faces. That was fun to make, because it really did look like they are wearing masks. It was fun to adjust the swan’s eyes and matching it with the other features of the subjects like her lips and nose. It matched so that’s awesome.

The least obvious part, I think, was the hairdo. If you notice the swan heads are actually part of the hairdo. Their heads kinda stick out of the dancer’s hair, looking like a bun. These pictues below are the original ones. It’s not that obvious.. but you can make it out in the picture.