Digital Surreal — I am Anna Thomas

Digital Surreal
– Fine Art Digital Compositing

This image was created as part of a digital imaging cluster focused on developing robust Photoshop skills.

We were asked to research traditional and contemporary surrealism in photographic practice and use the research to inform the development and creation of our own surreal image.

I read a lot of fiction and recently really enjoyed “The Expanse” series by James S. A. Corey. I had a really clear mental picture for several of the passages and I was keen to see if I could recreate my mental image photographically.

Reference Text & Visual Brainstorm

“In the light of his terminal, like the glow of a single candle, black tendrils reached from the shower stall towards the ruined lights, bent and branching like skeletal leaves.

In the shower stall, Juliette Andromeda Mao lay dead.

Her eyes were closed, and that was a mercy. … She was nude and barely human. Coils of complex growth spilled from her … Her ribs and spine had grown spurs like knives that stretched pale skin, ready to cut themselves free of her. Tubes stretched from her back and throat, crawling up the walls behind her.”

“The clean, simple lines and error-reducing design of the place still showed under the outgrowth of the protomolecule. Barely. Knots of dark filament and nautilus spirals softened the corners of wall and floor and ceiling. Loops hung from the ceiling like Spanish moss.”

“She was in a hazmat analysis node, lying on a bed of the dark thread that spilled out from her spine until it was indistinguishable from a massive fairy-tale cushion of her own flowing hair. Tiny points of blue light glittered on her face, her arms, her breasts. The bone spurs that had been pressing out of her skin had grown into sweeping, almost architectural connections with the lushness around her. … Her eye were closed, but he could see them shifting and dancing under the lids. And she was breathing”