During my childhood, something I always liked to do was draw. I would bring a pen or pencil everywhere I went and doodle the things I saw around me. Looking back on the sketches that my mom kept of mine from childhood, I was very surprised. I would draw things like a garden, yet in the background I would draw things that had no relation to the scene at all. In one drawing, I drew a swimming pool with trees growing out of it. I realized how creative children are. Adult artists tend to draw serious and realistic things that are logical. Children look at a simple landscape and turn it into a creative, whimsical piece of art. Even though children’s artwork obviously isn't as well crafted as adults, there are aspects of children’s art that real artists can learn from.

 

My progress in composing this photograph was to create a cliche verre. A cliche verre is a is a combination of painting and or drawing, with photography. In this process, I painted a scene on a clear piece of paper. I then scanned it onto the computer and aligned it with the digital photo I took. That way the white paint would be overtop of the realistic, nature scene. This concept is perfect for my idea. The background image is what the landscape actually looks like, while the cliche verre layered over top is what children’s artwork may look like of the same scene. The big trees and planets out during the daytime show things that children may draw due to their creative minds.

 

The most difficult challenge I faced was aligning the photo and the cliche verre in photoshop. After painting on the clear paper, I printed out a large enough size of the background photo to test how they aligned. It worked well until I put them both into photoshop. The first time I created a cliche verre was with a film photograph. This was much easier because the cliche verre was simply reflected onto the background image in the darkroom. In my case, I had to manually resize the cliche verre to fit the size of the photograph on the computer since I was using digital.  It required a lot of editing and cropping but I was able to create the final image and message I hoped to portray.