The Music Maker and the Music Taker

In the spring of 2023 I took a Photoshop class at the UTSA Southwest School of Art. One of our first assignments was to create an image in the style of Giuseppe Arcimboldo, “an Italian painter best known for creating imaginative portrait heads made entirely of objects such as fruits, vegetables, flowers, fish and books” (Wikipedia). I had never seen the paintings of Giuseppe before, and was very inspired by his incredibly creative work. For my class project, I created two figures: The Music Maker (aka, the HooDoo Man), who represents the purity and joy of music performed live…and The Music Taker (aka, the VooDoo Man), who represents the life crushing forces of prerecorded music. I’m very appreciative for the guidance of the class instructor Michelle Love, who taught me all sorts of new things in Photoshop that I didn’t think were possible.

This was another project where I composed some music and was looking for some visuals for it (similar to what I did for The Emancipation of Annabel Lee). I liked the two images I created for the class so much, I decided to animate them and use them as the visuals. The story is pretty simple: the characters are introduced, there is a battle between the two, clone armies are created and then clash, and the good guy wins at the end. And oh yeah – there’s an inexcusable attempt at rapping…

This was a fun project, and one I worked intensely on for over a month, Enjoy!