WE'LL EAT FLOWERS! A GIF Digital Installation for the ART EXPLOSION WEEK 62: theme COLOR... and to celebrate MY FIRST YEAR IN STEEMIT
Here is the GIF version
Hello, my esteemed friends from the Steem Township:
On the eve of celebrating my first year at Steemit, and despite the constant blackouts and Internet fails in Venezuela, here I am--
I begin by thanking again @juliakponsford for conceiving and curating this interesting contest as Art Explosion, whose bases are here. In my opinion this is the most important of the Visual Arts contests in the Steemit platform in terms of the power to convene participants, most of whom participate with high quality work and which has some very generous awards.
This week is a great pleasure to participate because, as I said, I am celebrating my first year in Steemit, fighting with the really serious problems that we suffer in Venezuela, which make it difficult for me to dedicate the necessary time. This 62 week's theme is COLOR, and being such a general content lends itself to anything, even boring things je je je.
Without having a clear idea of what to do, I was wandering around the courtyard of a relative who raises fighting cocks, something that I personally refuse. In the basement of his house I found an old statue of Simón Bolívar who, as you know, is called El Libertador (The Liberator) for having led the struggle for the independence of Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia and Peru. I also came across a bag full of old 50 bolivar paper bills, already out of circulation due to one of the many inefficient economic measures taken by Nicolás Maduro.
All those elements seemed ideal to make a simple installation in the form of a GIF that would be a metaphor for how sad and gray the history of my country, Venezuela, has become. But how do you relate them to this week's theme? Well, it occurred to me to resort to digital technology. Yes, I would make a digital installation from the photos of the elements found almost at random to which I would add colorful components.
WE'LL EAT FLOWERS! STEP BY STEP
As I said, I'm not a professional illustrator but an improvised amateur. So I won't give a great explanation, technically speaking, on how I got to the result that I share with you today. I will only briefly describe the steps through which I arrived at the final finish of my Digital Installation:
I did this little exercise of artistic exploration using three resources: the photos taken with my obsolete Samsung phone, the free software https://FireAlpaca, using all its great stock of tools which are available for free; and a Demo that I downloaded from the page https://www.easygifanimator.net/ with which I edited the images and converted them into a GIF to later publish it in the www.
As a starting point I placed in the space the elements with which I would make the real part of the installation, I took a series of photographs and then I selected them:
I chose one of the cages where the poor roosters are imprisoned.
The rooster is a recurrent element in the history and tradition of many countries.
I made four groups of money paper. It is such the magnitude of the socio-economic crisis that we live in recent Venezuelan history that these bills have no value.
I found a ceramic statue of the greatest figure in Venezuelan history, Simón Bolívar.
Then I proceeded to assemble the objects to assemble an ephemeral installation. The cage with the trapped rooster would be the base. As a pedestal I used the four piles of money bills.
On the useless bills I placed the statue of the Liberator.
The "real" part of the installation is ready... Now is when the hard work begins...
I downloaded and edited the selected images with FireAlpaca. I cut out these images, worked on them and applied filters to revive their color.
There I found a stormy sky, which I stretched to serve as the background of my Digital Installation.
I stole an image of a barrel of oil, an element of the greatest relevance in the Venezuelan economy to the point of being the support of our history since the twentieth century.
I also edited the image of a white horse, similar to the one that runs free in the national shield, but this one is malnourished and subdued.
I thought it was funny to include the image of one of the cornucopias that adorns the Venezuelan national coat of arms, which, Oh irony, are symbols of the abundance of food.
I ordered the different elements until I put together my Digital Installation.
So... my Digital Installation is ready.
Then I used the FireAlpaca Flowers effect to create a great rain of flowers of many COLORS coming out of the floating cornucopia.
Yes, I know it's corny, but that's what it's all about: eating flowers!
Finally I organized the images to create a sequence that would give the illusion of movement. I processed them with a Demo of the Easy GIF Animator software and published the GIF thanks to https://media.giphy.com/. In this way I gave the work its current appearance, as it appears at the beginning of this post.
With this small artwork I wanted to express my discomfort at the history of the country where I am forced to live because, somehow, the terrible situation in which we live, in which, according to the UN, three out of four Venezuelans require humanitarian aid, is the result of a long chain of errors that we have been dragging for centuries.
When nothing remains of the country... we' ll eat flowers!
Support Venezuelan Artists like I am...
We're in the middle of a big humanitarian crisis!
100% 🅾🆁🅸🅶🅸🅽🅰🅻 🅲🅾🅽🆃🅴🅽🆃
The texts, photos and edition are of my intellectual authorship.
https://www.deepl.com/ helps me with the traslation
https://FireAlpaca
https://www.easygifanimator.net/
https://media.giphy.com/
were the software I used to create this artwork
It would be a great pleasure for me if you visited my blog--
@yomismosoy
On the eve of celebrating my first year at Steemit, and despite the constant blackouts and Internet fails in Venezuela, here I am--
I begin by thanking again @juliakponsford for conceiving and curating this interesting contest as Art Explosion, whose bases are here. In my opinion this is the most important of the Visual Arts contests in the Steemit platform in terms of the power to convene participants, most of whom participate with high quality work and which has some very generous awards.
This week is a great pleasure to participate because, as I said, I am celebrating my first year in Steemit, fighting with the really serious problems that we suffer in Venezuela, which make it difficult for me to dedicate the necessary time. This 62 week's theme is COLOR, and being such a general content lends itself to anything, even boring things je je je.
Without having a clear idea of what to do, I was wandering around the courtyard of a relative who raises fighting cocks, something that I personally refuse. In the basement of his house I found an old statue of Simón Bolívar who, as you know, is called El Libertador (The Liberator) for having led the struggle for the independence of Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia and Peru. I also came across a bag full of old 50 bolivar paper bills, already out of circulation due to one of the many inefficient economic measures taken by Nicolás Maduro.
All those elements seemed ideal to make a simple installation in the form of a GIF that would be a metaphor for how sad and gray the history of my country, Venezuela, has become. But how do you relate them to this week's theme? Well, it occurred to me to resort to digital technology. Yes, I would make a digital installation from the photos of the elements found almost at random to which I would add colorful components.
WE'LL EAT FLOWERS! STEP BY STEP
As I said, I'm not a professional illustrator but an improvised amateur. So I won't give a great explanation, technically speaking, on how I got to the result that I share with you today. I will only briefly describe the steps through which I arrived at the final finish of my Digital Installation:
I did this little exercise of artistic exploration using three resources: the photos taken with my obsolete Samsung phone, the free software https://FireAlpaca, using all its great stock of tools which are available for free; and a Demo that I downloaded from the page https://www.easygifanimator.net/ with which I edited the images and converted them into a GIF to later publish it in the www.
As a starting point I placed in the space the elements with which I would make the real part of the installation, I took a series of photographs and then I selected them:
I chose one of the cages where the poor roosters are imprisoned.
The rooster is a recurrent element in the history and tradition of many countries.
I made four groups of money paper. It is such the magnitude of the socio-economic crisis that we live in recent Venezuelan history that these bills have no value.
I found a ceramic statue of the greatest figure in Venezuelan history, Simón Bolívar.
Then I proceeded to assemble the objects to assemble an ephemeral installation. The cage with the trapped rooster would be the base. As a pedestal I used the four piles of money bills.
On the useless bills I placed the statue of the Liberator.
The "real" part of the installation is ready... Now is when the hard work begins...
I downloaded and edited the selected images with FireAlpaca. I cut out these images, worked on them and applied filters to revive their color.
There I found a stormy sky, which I stretched to serve as the background of my Digital Installation.
I stole an image of a barrel of oil, an element of the greatest relevance in the Venezuelan economy to the point of being the support of our history since the twentieth century.
I also edited the image of a white horse, similar to the one that runs free in the national shield, but this one is malnourished and subdued.
I thought it was funny to include the image of one of the cornucopias that adorns the Venezuelan national coat of arms, which, Oh irony, are symbols of the abundance of food.
I ordered the different elements until I put together my Digital Installation.
So... my Digital Installation is ready.
Then I used the FireAlpaca Flowers effect to create a great rain of flowers of many COLORS coming out of the floating cornucopia.
Yes, I know it's corny, but that's what it's all about: eating flowers!
Finally I organized the images to create a sequence that would give the illusion of movement. I processed them with a Demo of the Easy GIF Animator software and published the GIF thanks to https://media.giphy.com/. In this way I gave the work its current appearance, as it appears at the beginning of this post.
With this small artwork I wanted to express my discomfort at the history of the country where I am forced to live because, somehow, the terrible situation in which we live, in which, according to the UN, three out of four Venezuelans require humanitarian aid, is the result of a long chain of errors that we have been dragging for centuries.
When nothing remains of the country... we' ll eat flowers!
Support Venezuelan Artists like I am...
We're in the middle of a big humanitarian crisis!
100% 🅾🆁🅸🅶🅸🅽🅰🅻 🅲🅾🅽🆃🅴🅽🆃
The texts, photos and edition are of my intellectual authorship.
https://www.deepl.com/ helps me with the traslation
https://FireAlpaca
https://www.easygifanimator.net/
https://media.giphy.com/
were the software I used to create this artwork
It would be a great pleasure for me if you visited my blog--
@yomismosoy
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