Surely, many people store on their hard drives or in cloud storage terabytes of photographs taken for the time their using digital photographic equipment. For example, I have at least 4 terabyte disks clogged with photos from numerous trips, travels, from simple city walks or some kind of events. And I still do not deal with photography professionally, and it’s scary to imagine the volumes of photographs that professional photographers have. But now I’m more likely not about the "weight" of digital images, but about their quantity. To put it mildly, there are a lot of pictures, and what to do with them is unclear.

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They lie "dead weight" and only occasionally a man pile a bunch of information, glancing superficially, recalling some moments from life. I recently decided to make such a project in order to breathe new energy into old pictures, to attract them to a kind of business, to give them a new purpose. I came up with the idea of making a series of digital avatars, calling for the embodiment of animal characters. But decided to weave their “fabric” not just with colors, lines, textures or whatever else in traditional ways, but with the help of photographs available in the archives! I decided to make portraits of iconic powerful animals, for creation, the assembly of which I decided to use stylized fragments of photographs; something like a digital collage, but a little modified. The main difference from the traditional collage technique is that I additionally processed the material (photo) to give it more plasticity, for a more precise fit to the image being created.

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The technique is as follows. At first I drew a sketch on paper with a pencil. A fairly simple, linear pattern with the designation of the main forms, details and features of the animal. Then transferred it to a digital format and here it was already divided into fragments, “patches”, according to the form and volumes, as I imagined them. Each image was obtained from several dozen such patches. I came up with the idea that these works should have a resolution sufficient to print at least 600x900mm with high-quality printing. So the files were created large enough and fragments of photographs, which were then customized into patches, turned out to be detailed. This is the most interesting and fascinating stage of work - the search and selection of photos for the formed images. Of course, the work is not fast - many hours were spent only on finding the right shots in the archives, in which the correct content, suitable textures, color, details and tone ratios were present. For each patch, I looked at new pictures every time - I tried so that there were no repetitions. Here it would be possible to complicate the task even further and for each image to look for its own specific theme or link to a specific event or phenomenon, then it would turn out, for example, an “Avatar of Bangkok streets”, which would be collected only from street photo materials made in the capital of Thailand. But this is a really difficult, time-consuming task that would require even more time and attention, and here I could not afford to get toodeep in the process. Fragments of selected photographs were placed in patches taken from the sketch and then using manipulations in the graphics editor, stylized to bring them into line with the color-tonal component of the work being formed. Then they fit in place, weaving into a single "fabric" of the image. And so it was repeated until all the patches were filled with the correct fragments of the photo, combining well with each other inside the whole image. On the formation of one portrait of an animal, it took me an average of about 10 hours.

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Of course, the first avatars are different from those made last. Here you can see the level of detail, and the quality of fitting the patches to each other and the level of stylization, ensuring the integrity and character of the image. For example, the early Tigers turned out to be somewhat more unbridled and hooligan than the later Bison, Boar and Monkey. The monkey turned out to be some kind of incredibly philosophical and intellectual, in my subjective opinion. I believe that these differences are normal, because I have never done anything like this before and my personal growth in this activity took place inside the process. I found new ways of processing images, my vision of the images of avatars changed on the go, so it is not surprising that in the end they turned out to be quite different guys. But, despite this, all of them, it seems to me, turned out to be sincere, alive and with character. And of course I am incredibly pleased with all of them.

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I think, as prints on the wall or on the fabric, they will be very good! Now I have a wonderful company of animals, in the images of which many trips, walks, pleasant events or simply fragments of life from the past, swirl and pulsate. Some of these patches, even I author can no longer identify, because in some cases the processing of the photographic material was very strong. But this is not important, since the energetics of old photographs are more important here, which now not only continue to be in the archives, but also have found a new life and can please the audience as part of a spectacular visual content.

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I hope the results of my creative experiment will turn out to be interesting not only for me, but also for all those who have hundreds of thousands of photographs deposited on digital media, which, for sure, are worth much more than unknown storing in forgotten folders. You can try something like this! Or, you can get one of this guys - they are already availiable as posters at famous and reliable print-shop. Prints on steel by https://displate.com/whitehoune/animalismo )

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