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Welcome to Impart, an art gallery showcasing sketch and digital artwork by acclaimed artist Deslea R. Judd. Deslea is a self-taught artist with an interest in the entertainment industry. Her artwork has appeared in The Hollywood Reporter, on many websites including the X Files Official Site, and has also been used in several fundraising campaigns.
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"Lonely Door" - Interpretive digital artwork themed on The Majestic (2001). Source images courtesy of Castle Rock Entertainment.
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A larger version (1152 x 864 pixels) is available here. Image opens in a new window.
This artwork is based on the movie The Majestic, using images from the electronic press kit with kind permission of Castle Rock Entertainment. I've wanted to work with Martin Landau for a while. He's got incredible features - great age and experience are just etched right into him. I don't work with collaging men much, except in a romantic context, so I wanted to give something different a try.
Quick background for those who haven't see the movie. Landau plays Harry Trimble, whose son Luke went missing in action nine years ago. Harry's never really moved on. He's still stuck in the early stages of grief, developmentally. A man with amnesia stumbles into town (played by Jim Carrey) who bears a resemblance to Luke, and Harry takes him in, and together they rebuild his theatre, The Majestic, and basically set about making the dream life Harry's been wanting ever since Luke was lost. Harry dies of a heart attack just as "Luke" puts together that he isn't Luke at all.
The idea behind the collage is my hypothesis that Harry subconsciously knew all along that "Luke" was not his son, and that his heart attack was a kind of subconscious decision to die (in the way many ill people do when their unfinished business has been settled) because he could see it all starting to unravel. There's a lot of reasons for me thinking this, which I won't bore you with here. Anyway, one of the key scenes in this hypothesis of mine is one where Harry takes "Luke" to the cemetary, tells him Luke's story, and puts Luke's war medals around his neck. You can see that scene in the collage, and there's a quote from that scene as well. I think of this scene as a kind of investiture - Harry is "making" Luke his son in this scene, and Luke accepts that identity (at least provisionally).
The artwork is done in Paint Shop Pro 5. The pensive picture of Harry is actually a still from the set of Landau with director Frank Darabont (who I cropped out). I started with that picture and built it up from there. The main pic was already grayscale, so I used the highlight/midtone/shadow sliders to exaggerate the lighting and then brightness/contrast to exaggerate the contrasts. Then I added an edge filter. Pretty much all the layers were treated in this way, although for the colour ones I had to reduce the saturation to zero for a b/w effect first. Obviously, some I sharpened and enhanced more than others. I used the selection tool, mostly at 20-pixel feather, to select and delete the unwanted portions of pictures, and I blended the edges with motion blur. I sometimes sharpened to emphasise the lines of the blur, and in other cases I used the touchup brush to lighten or darken the edges of layers where it contrasted with either an adjacent layer or a layer beneath. In terms of techniques used, this was actually quite a simple piece, but it took a long time and a lot of attention to detail. I save in layers many times along the way under new filenames so I can backtrack if I need to. I have twelve versions of this piece during the in-progress stages.
Once the base image was done, I merged and started working on the text. The main, LUKE was done in Porcelain, about 480pt. It has been eroded, sharpened, and drop-shadowed. The drop shadow has a slight blur. I set the layer opacity to about 30%. The next stage was the finer text - the "His name was Luke" quote. I wanted block caps but a faint fifties feel, to match the movie, and settled on Eyechart. The drop shadow was achieved by duplicating the block text layer, adding a motion blur and moving that layer beneath the text. The third lot of text was done in much the same way (without the drop shadow) and I wound up adding a brighten filter as well. That text, not legible in this preview, is a key line in my hypothesis about Harry's "decision" - the words of his friend Doc Stanton: "What if his memory does come back? Which life would he choose?" Then I added my signature in a new layer on the bottom right corner and saved it in layers. After that, I saved it as a JPG with compression set at 1. Those are my personal base versions for if I ever want to work with it, or ever want to get nice clean uncompressed copies of it again.
I start a new folder for each project, and after it's done I keep all my in-progress pieces on CD. The folder for this one was about 30MB when I finished. I use the in-progress CD backups a lot, actually. A lot of discarded changes or layers I didn't like for one piece get recycled on another project down the track.
The name, "Lonely Door", is a reference to the song "Gravity Of Love" by Enigma. The line goes, "But if you're in the eye of the storm, just think of the lonely door - the experience of survival is the key to the gravity of love." I interpret that as being about the loneliness of death - the idea that love is for the living, so love and survival are two sides of the one coin. In that interpretation, "lonely door" is death. I guess to me it speaks in some way about the kind of choice Harry faced (subconsciously) and the idea of the courage to face reality as a kind of price of love - a key theme to the movie.
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