Giving your heart away

For the last 7 years or so I have been taking part in The Scavenger Hunt. It is fun friendly competition where photographers of ALL skill levels, are given a set of words and a time frame in which to take (or create) images based on the set words for that particular round.

A few years ago one of the words was “risk“. As with many of my scavenger hunt entries, I decided to create a conceptual image.

The idea behind my photo is that when you love someone with all your heart there is a certain risk involved, as it makes you vulnerable and can open you up to heartache and pain.

I thought this was an appropriate time to share how I made this image, as my oldest child, has recently completed his degree and moved out of home to start a new job in Cape Town. I am immensely proud of all he has achieved and I know that this is the natural course of life but right now it literally feels like my heart has been ripped out of my chest.

Making the heart

I made the heart out of red play dough. My daughter helped me and we had fun researching the structure of the heart, and adding all the ventricles, veins and arteries.

The blood was a mixture of syrup and red food colouring. It was a very messy affair and once again my daughter helped me to press the shutter while I held the heart out in front of me.

Making the hole in my chest

For the hole in my chest, I cut a round jagged hole from a piece of fabric and coated the edges with the “bloody” syrup mixture. I put it against my skin to photograph it, which in the end wasn’t actually necessary as I ended up darkening the centre completely.

Putting it together

I cut the “hole” from the fabric and placed that on my chest in the right position. The photo that I used as the base image did not have the heart facing the way that I wanted it to, so I cut the heart from another image. I used various parts of a few different images to get the blood covering my hands in all the places that I wanted it. In addition to that, I added fake photoshop blood, which I learned how to create from from a tutorial by Phlearn

I darkened the background (a lot) and blurred it too. If I had to do this image over again, I probably would not blur the background so much and maybe not darken the background so much.

A quote by Alfred Lord Tennyson
“Tis better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all.”