Food Habits Assignment

Having a ‘creative license’ to do whatever one pleases with an image is a lot more difficult than one may think. As stated by Patricia D. Stokes, “complete freedom makes writing a piece of novel prose difficult, if not impossible”. This applies also to someone given the task of simply creatively modifying an image using programs such as Adobe Photoshop CS5. However, an assignment with constraints on “both subject and style” turns the impossible task into an inevitable one.1 The images 1Da, 1Db and 1Dc are all manipulated versions of an original image, done so with constraints given along with the creative license. Whilst we are given the constraints of limiting our manipulation to firstly of colour change, then a perspective change and finally an incorporation modification, it is evident from each persons different take on the constraints that, as Ward, Smith, and Finke (1999) state, creativity may involve two key cognitive capacities: conceptual combination and idea generation, creativity is a subjective license.2 The constraints given to us are not only what enable us to decide what we are going to do in our manipulations, but how far we can take these manipulations, and how creative we can become. If we were simply told to produce three separate images, each a different take on the original, most would have struggled to complete one. The constraints however gave us a window of opportunity to do so, as demonstrated in the assignment. Image 1Da demonstrates the creative element of colour, showing how it can be used to give a once normal image a certain surreal feel to it. Image 1Db takes a further creative step, using perspective to create a totally new image from the original. Without taking careful note, one would look past the fact that the face is made from coffee plungers. And finally image 1Dc places an abstract take on the original.

1 Stokes D. Patricia, 2007, Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, Vol. 1, No. 2, 107–113, American