Project 3: Personal Artifact

For my personal artifact, I chose a bead bracelet that my grandmother gave me when I was in high school. I always wear bracelets and that is my favorite bracelet not only because of the way it looks but because my grandmother gave it to me. When she gave it to me, she said that it was supposed to bring balance and stability into your life. While I don't necessarily believe that a bracelet can bring balance and stability, I do think that if you think about that a lot, you will unknowingly do things that lead to balance and stability. I really love the look of this bracelet too. The few colorful beads stand out and I thought it could make for an eye-catching, interesting composition. 

Here is a simple picture of the bracelet. Like I said earlier, I really love the seven colored beads. I also love the reflective nature of the bracelet. Lastly, I like that there are elements of the bracelet that you can see through.

I wanted to take pictures of the bracelet in different environments. I thought that this would give me a lot of options when working on the final composition because I didn't have a clear idea of exactly what I wanted to do for the final when I started taking the pictures. I took some pictures with the bracelet on, some with the bracelet on a yellow background (purple's compliment), and some of the bracelet beads in a different formation. I really just wanted to give myself as many options as I could. 

This is the image that I ended up using for the final composition. I thought back to what my grandmother said about the meaning of the bracelet and I wanted to depict that in my composition. In this picture, the bracelet is about to fall off of a step. I liked that this kind of went against the balance that the bracelet is supposed to bring. I liked the irony of something that is supposed to bring balance falling. 

This is the final composition. Again, I went back to the meaning of the bracelet and that led me to mirror the image. Because it is a mirror image, it creates visual balance and stability. I also wanted to really bring out the color of the beads so I did that in photoshop. The edited color of the step also brings out texture which I like. Lastly, I added a small percent of noise in photoshop. I like the vintage feel it gives to the composition. I think that that makes sense because it was my grandmother who gave me the bracelet and the vintage feel connects with the era that she grew up in.