It’s comforting to know that even now Photoshop can be rivaled with some construction paper, an X-Acto knife and a few lights.
These are the tools David Reeves uses to produce his highly dynamic series of cutout silhouette photos that are based on his favorite comic books, movies and videogames.
“I just try to keep it simple,” says Reeves, 28, a photography major at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax, Canada.
Reeves, who came up with the idea because he needed a final project for school and didn’t want to be photographing out in the Canadian cold, has only been doing cutouts for a couple of months but has already created several artful and expressive scenes that have struck a chord with viewers across the world.
He makes them by tracing the characters off his laptop or TV and then transferring the tracings to black construction paper. After cutting all the figures out he glues them to different holds (including old Nag Champa boxes) and arranges the scene so there are various foreground and background elements.
For the gun smoke he uses cotton balls and the clouds in the background are made out of paper towels. When he needs fog or mist he uses a little incense smoke and the grass in some of the scenes is made from paper clips with paper taped to it.
“Everything is jury rigged,” says Reeves.
All the scenes are backlit to create the silhouette and Reeves shoots with a Canon 85mm f1.8 that creates a super shallow depth of field and intensifies the sharpness of the foreground characters.
His first cutouts were based on the videogame LIMBO, which is where he got the idea for his lighting technique. Since then he’s drawn inspiration from Frank Millers’ The Dark Knight Returns comic book, used zombies from the videogame Resident Evil and picked off samurai and cowboy characters from random movies and paintings.
From concept to finished photograph Reeves says the process usually takes six to eight hours. Most of them are done in one day because he can’t leave them for fear they’ll get destroyed.
“It his has to be quick and dirty,” he says. “Because my cat has jumped up an annihilated everything.”
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