Protest: Final Poster!

I know its been a while since i mentioned anything about this project but ive got my protest poster done after much shedding of blood sweat and tears.

Who Are We? NewHive Front Page

My first NewHive page is going to be a group photo of all my social media characters or 'tuplas' hanging out together like the paintings of the gods in olympus. I got all my photos sorted after a very long day so it was just a matter of getting them cut out and collaged together.

Just like with my Venus page i chose a large image for the background, in this case a nice landscape by Horatio McCulloch (not related). I wasnt sure if i wanted to use this as my background i was just getting something there for my characters to go on top of but its actually really grown on me.

Glencoe is about to get funky

I cut out all my characters in photoshop again, took a bit of time but you start to get used it and using the mouse in quite a precise way and just placed them on top of this image which again was made much more colourful.

you might be able to see my pretty passable photoshop edits of my ass Kim K style

At this point i wasnt totally sure what to do with the devil character, i hadnt been able to get a good full body shot but i had plenty from the shoulders up that i had used to make my devils avatar. I had this idea to create a pop up windowfor the devil to appear in, saying something annoying and trolling. I found this window someone had created on deviant art and used it to create my pop up window, placing my edited devil selfie on an illustration from Paradise Lost by Gustave Dore.

I quite like the way the trumpets form a spiky crown as well as symbolising this character being a loudmouth

I also added a cheeky little window which was an edit of an existing windows message found on google. That was the background image basically finished apart from a nice green smoothie radiating healthy energy floating in Aegle255s hand

On NewHive im going to ass this nice glitter gif i made with my own fair hand and thats it done :)

Who Are We? The Venus Hive

I started work on this newhive page because its the one i had the clearest ideas for, i wanted to reacreate a depiction of the goddess Venus but using my own photo in this weird kind of cyberspace world.

So i started by cutting out this lovely photo id taken at home in photoshop. I stuck a red filled layer underneath used the rubber tool to do an outline, the red makes it easier to see what your cutting out and the dropped cut out me onto a nice desktop background of clouds and water.

I messed a bit around with the saturation to give it a bit of a cyberspacey early 90s graphics look.

 

To make it more like one of the old paintings of the goddess Venus i cut out these cherubs from Cabanels Birth of Venus, flipped them and used the hue and saturation tool i used on the background to make them bright pink.

The Original Venus (The Birth of Venus, Alexandre Cabanel)

My Venus

Next job was to create a gif that looked like a photobooth window, i just took a screenshot of my photobooth window with lots of photos of me done up like venus, cut away all of the stuff i didnt need and made a gif in photoshop from a video also made in photobooth

 

Who Are We? Getting Ready For NewHive

Its onto making time, I've got pictures done for the physical representations of my profiles, this was easy to do for my realgirl and venus but took a bit more thinking when it came to the devil and aegle characters. I had looked at some classical art depictions of the devil but i felt that they didnt really fit in with what the image i was trying to create, so i thought about online anonymity and the default avatars you get on websites, those anonymous grey faces. Moving on from that i looked at sort of scary, sometimes androgenous makeup from the likes of Marilyn Manson, Mathu Andersen and Yolandi Visser before creating my own kinda androgenous anonymous default avatar thing.

Mathu Andersen

Next was the Aegle255 character which was also a bit difficult to figure out  because her whole character is less about her physical apprearance and more about the things that represent her, her healthy eating, her sunny holidays, smoothies, green juices and home decor. I had this image in my head of Rene Magrittes Son of Man, i liked the idea of an obscured face, i thought id use some nice tulips from markies for my own photo, i think i might obscure her further, or add more to get this idea that shes more about things than physicality.

Rene Magritte's Son of Man

Venus35813 was pretty easy i already knew what i wanted to do for her photos. I made a recreation of one of Kim Kardashians most infamous instagram posts as well as some lounging photos that i want to use to recreate a painting of the goddess Venus.

How to get famous on the internet, Kim Kardashian

Who Are We? Follow all my fake social media

Its been a strange few weeks keeping up all these different social media profiles and i have to say I've been getting really tied up in keeping up the pretense of these fake lives. Like i never realised how obsessed i would get with spending time on Pinterest and Instagram and the rush you feel when you get the likes within seconds of posting an image. The Aegle255 profile has been a bit frustrating, I've been getting likes on my Instagram posts but barely any followers, its been just as slow going for Pinterest and getting attention on Facebook. The whole thing makes me think about the social media i use in my real life and how little i post and how little people seem to care about it. I suppose its how my realgirl261 feels, having these profiles that are a false representation of yourself getting more attention, people caring more about a life carefully crafted with a filter put on than the real you. Its funny that its happening to me though and i know that after this project I'm probably gonna kick start my own instagram and stuff to chase that like high again. This resentment that realgirl261 feels might lead to the creation of devil45701, an outlet of frustration at these beautiful, happy, aspirational fakes she's made.

So if you want to look at (or even follow) any of my accounts here they are(more added soon):

Realgirl261 Instagram

Aegle 255 Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook

Venus35813 Instagram

Devil45701 Twitter

Who Are We? My perfect instagram life

The next bunch of profiles im setting up are for my aspirational health blogger Aegle255, named in part after the Greek goddess of radiant health. For this character i have to create the fiction of a perfect life and perfect health following the guidelines set out for the perfect instagram. Im also extending Aegle255 to Facebook, which in my opinion is a bit humble braggy and maybe tends to have an older user group as well as Pinterest which is the home of inspirational quotes, home decor and all your favourite gluten free vegan recipes.

This fantasy has some basis in reality though, ive been combing through my old holiday pictures to find some pretty pinteresty looking ones, i'll either post them for #tbt or pretend im currently in the french countryside soaking in the sun but i think the reality of doing this in the lovely Scottish May weather might be too depressing.

Who Are We? Becoming Venus35813

Tags from @jamiegenevieve

Ive set up my Venus profile and things have been going okay with it, i started off on instagram just getting a feel for it, figuring out what tags to use and how to get my profile noticed. When i was posting my first picture there were 67,542,303 posts in the tag 'makeup', 1,217,781 posts for 'brows' and 266,157,947 posts tagged 'selfie'. Ive found that one of the easiest and quickest ways of getting attention for a selfie is to tag a specific makeup company for example #mac has 9,733,947 tagged posts but #rimmel only has 669,731, gotta think strategically about tags.

I put a few selfies up, made sure to put in lots of tags and ive got quite a bit of likes and a few follows. Have to say im not totally sold on these images, i dont think they look quite enough not like me. Im gonna start again with some selfies directly based on the profiles ive been looking at for inspiration.

Who Are We? Creating Characters

I said before about the two characters i had ideas to create, an ultra feminine fantasy woman drawing inspiration from Kim Kardashian and classical depictions of the goddess Venus and on the other side of the coin a trolling devil spreading negative influence. To tie these two together i have a real girl in the middle, the one creating these profiles and ive come up with a fourth idea based on the trend of fitspo.

Fitspo or Fitspiration is basically a trend for using health advice, healthy looking bodies or healthy diet tips as a replacement for sexualised images of thin, presumably unhealthy women, sometimes this is known as thinspo and is related to eating disorders. I dont know how i feel about fitspo, on one hand its seen as the antidote to images of incredibly thin women we see in media constantly but at the same time but at the same time theres a clear lack of diversity in the images you see tagged fitspo, most of the time its the same slim women in a sports bra holding a smoothie. Theres a really good article on the Guardian called 'Fitspo: how stong became the new skinny' which actually explains it pretty well.

My own profile is going to be less about the body politics of fitspiration and more about the aspirational angle of the 'perfect instagram account' as written about on Man Repeller. Looking at my own social media im pretty sure i do follow a few of these people, the ones constantly shopping at farmers markets, having gluten free vegan treats, doing juice cleanses, hot yoga sessions, barre classes and candles, so many candles. I think for me this is going to be the most fantastical of my creations because i have to make my life look so much better rather than rely on what i can do with my body through makeup or photoshop.

Instagram @ameezydeezylemonsqueezy The perfect Instagram account