Council Estate

Within this series i wanted to address the negative attitude towards council estates and high rise flats. I have used post production techniques to make the buildings more interesting and colourful. These images were mainly inspired by Stephen Gill's images and the Sony Bravia advert. Photographs of flowers, paint and graffiti were layered with the buildings to make them more pleasing to the eye.

(please read from the bottom of this post and work upwards)


The text in this image works a lot better as it is more simple and linear. It gives the image form and works well with the composition and linear nature of the buildings.


This background was inverted in this image. It really brings out the texture of the paper. The colour makes the image look like a night scene. I was not sure the hand written text worked as well with this background.


I decided to experiment with text as most of the graphic design i was researching involved text in some way and i felt something was missing from the image below. The text i used was a mixture of typed and hand drawn. It was not intended to be entirely legible. It involves definitions of 'buildings', 'class' , 'house' and 'home' (although i swapped these round). There is also some text on Karl Marx and class and what determines one's class. This comes from my interest in sociology and the class structure in the UK.



The images above are by far my favorite. I think they are more visually pleasing than the others as they are a little more complicated. They were heavily inspired by Jurriaan Schalken. The paper used was scratched then covered in ink. I really like the texture this gives the image.



This building was done in a different way to all the others. First the image was desaturated, the contrast was increased. The layer blending tool was then used on Multiply. It was pasted onto the brown paper and inverted. The technique used for the paint in all of these images above is explained in the flower series.




Select - Colour Range - Midtones







I liked the idea of using graffiti to make these images more colourful and interesting. Graffiti is something we may expect to see near a council estate and there is often negative connotations associated with it. However it also has positive connotations for those who consider graffiti art. Crime or art?



Threshold Select - Colour Range - Midtones









Select - Colour Range - Highlights










The background is skull wrapping paper that was scanned in...


The top layer is from the coloured flower image (flower series). The midtones were selected as shown below.


The building was created using the Bitmap technique (see technical notes) layered twice, with on layer inverted (white).
This is how the coloured layers were created...


The layers were duplicated a few times, colours changed using levels and the rubber used to expose parts of the building.

This was created using the same layers as the 5th image in the flower series.



The brown paper was scanned in and used as the background for most of these images. I feel it worked better than any other background as it is quite plan yet the texture is still visible. The colour also works very well with black and white.


The image above was taken from a magazine, layered ontop of the threshold building. The Shadows were still selected so this layer was copied and pasted onto the brown paper. This creates the outline of the building in the colours of the magazine layer.


This image was created by selecting highlights from the images below...(a photograph of a poster in my room) It was then layered onto the building and a paint layer was added. Again i do not think this image works very well.


This image was created by layering a photograph of coloured letters (taken in the studio) on top of this image of a building. The rubber tool was used to get rid of the rest of the layer so just the windows were coloured. I don't think this image works particularly well........................