The Real Me…Swimming in Poutine and Beer

Here’s the back story: Some cool cats from my communication studies graduate diploma program and I attended an exhibition at the Canadian Centre for Architecture. At the event was an open bar. I really like beer.

Here’s the back-back story: I lived in Zambia for a year and didn’t get sick once. But then when I got home, I started having some dizzy spells and bouts of fatigue. Tests came back negative but my doctor gave me some drugs anyway. The thing is, you can’t enjoy delicious beer, or any alcoholic beverages, while taking these pills (a whole ten days worth!)

And then the back story and the back-back story collided. The exhibition was rocking – it turns out that if you serve free booze in Montreal, lots of people will show up. Everyone was double, triple, even quadruple-fisting the CCA’s tasty wares. Everyone except me because of those accursed drugs.

It was such a traumatic experience that I decided I must create a self-portrait that would encompass the evening.

I started with the following two pictures. The first one is a picture of me washing some dishes while I was in Zambia (I’m not sure why Zambia decided to give me such an inconvenient parting gift. All the same, I blame Zambia for it and wanted it to have some input into this portrait.). The second picture is a tall glass of delicious, lip-smacking beer.

Of course, the most obvious thing to do with these two pictures is to insert myself directly into the beer.

1. I used the Polygonal Lasso Tool to cut myself, including the items in my hands, out of the first picture.

2. I added this as a new layer to the picture of the beer, inserting myself into the glass until the bottom of the picture of me matched up with the top of the beer in the glass.

3. I cut out the very top of the beer glass and made it a new layer. I then reduced its opacity so that it would become translucent and it would look like I’m inside the glass as opposed to in front of it.

4. After having completed step 3, I noticed that it looked like the plate in my hand was also inside of the glass, but I wanted it to be on the outside. I cut the offending portion of the plate, made it a new layer and brought that layer in front of the glass layer so that it looks like it’s on the outside.

What resulted was a picture of me holding a plate and a rag while standing in a glass of beer. That doesn’t really come close to encompassing the experience of the evening. I mean, what in the world am I doing holding a plate and a rag? So I sought out the following two pictures:

5. I cut out the poutine on the left of the first picture, resized it and placed it onto the plate in my left hand in the picture above.

6. I cut out the pill bottle, including a couple of the pills and placed them into the hand holding the rag. I created a new layer for my fingers so that I could bring them to the front to make it look like they’re holding the bottle.

I made the pill bottle extra big to draw attention to it. However, I still felt like it needed added attention.

7. I adjusted the pills to make them glow.

The pills, after all, were the magical force that kept me away from an open bar for an entire evening. And magical things glow.

The reason for the poutine being there is pretty abstract. You see, we went for poutine later that night, so the poutine represents…my eating of poutine. (More on poutine below.)

I still didn’t feel like I was fully capturing everything. The CCA was chaotic. Lights were flashing, music was blaring and I got a pretty nasty headache. I thought this picture did a decent job of capturing the bedlam and my pain.

It was a little bit off, though, so I tweaked it.

7. I made the image grainier and sharpened it to make it a bit more harsh. I think red is a good colour for representing pain, so I increased the picture’s redness.

8. I made this picture my background. I found that it was perhaps a bit too busy and detracted from the rest of the picture so I darkened it until I felt like it was no longer doing so.

And here’s the result:

 

So there’s me, waist-deep in beer but not actually able to consume it because of the magical glowing pills in my right hand. My head hurts (the red-dominant background) and I’m in a highly chaotic environment (the flashing multicoloured lights in the background.) But still, that doesn’t exactly look like an unhappy fellow, huh? It seems like he’s fairly content, sort of shrugging his shoulders at the nuisances around him. I guess that’s what happens when you surround yourself with good people…and poutine.

~ by edjamartin on October 2, 2007.