Woohoo!

PPA’s International Print Competition is one of the best ways I know of to challenge oneself as a photographer and artist.

Last year I entered IPC for the first time and the amount I learned and grew as a photographer and digital artist amazed me.  I had a great year last year entering the Photographic Open category.  I entered 4 images and all 4 merited and 3 out of those 4 were voted as loans.  I became a 2016 Platinum Photographer of the Year last year which meant more to me than I can express.

This year, I entered 4 into the Photographic Open (PO) category and also chose to enter 4 into the Master Artist (MA) category.  It was an exhausting amount of work to prepare and submit 8 entries!  I had a great year meriting 7/8 of my entries!  All 4 of my Master Artist entries merited, making me a Bronze Medalist in the art category.  3/4 of my entries merited in the PO category.

My goal in the PO category was to merit more humans this year and goal accomplished!  Entering MA felt like a bonus challenge to begin my artistic journey.  For both categories, I wanted to make artistic images that meant something to me personally and push my skills to their max.

I started working on Woohoo! in November last year.  This was an effort that involved the whole family!  I knew what I wanted as my end vision.  I needed Mike to run Cayenne down the beach and hold the leash high.  Cayenne loved it and looks like such a big, happy lug.  Then Mike took Cayenne home and Wylie did some poses and faces for me and threw his hats and flip flops in the air for me.  When Mike returned, they threw more stuff in the air for me.  Then I had Wylie lay over Mikes knee so I could get his chest and arms flying.  I knew I wanted his feet kicked up in the back so I had them get into airplane position but it wasn’t really working out.  So then I had Mike push/toss Wylie’s legs into the air on 1-2-3-kick!

This image was a load of work to frankenstein together!  I used one shot of Wylie’s chest and head, one of his shirt/body, replaced arms, hands, leash grip from another day walking the dog, added blowing hair, and frankensteined in the legs in back.  Painted Cayenne to reduce the cutout look.  Worked on shadowing issues.  Then I had several depth of field issues to work out.  Luckily I had a whole slew of shots to replace ocean, sky, sand, and bush with.  By the time I was done almost nothing was as it was in any part of any of the original image.

I knew that if this did not pass muster at PPA IPC, I’d always still love this image of Wylie and Cayenne so it was a win no matter what for me.  Now to determine just how big to print this for my home!

When I told Wylie that his image had merited, he was truly excited!  He said “Mom, I couldn’t have done it without you.”.