Alexandra
Lai
I am a graphic designer born and raised in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. I moved to Edmonton in 2017 to pursue my passion for photography at MacEwan. I find inspiration in the mundane. I want my work to garner the public's appreciation for the beauty within the everyday.
My career goals are to be an editorial/commercial photographer or a freelance artist working out of my own studio. Design allows me to immerse myself in my creative process: setting up the camera, lighting, props, capturing, and editing photos. It may seem like a long and tedious process but it's why I love design. Over the pandemic, I bought a lot of candles and house plants.
My career goals are to be an editorial/commercial photographer or a freelance artist working out of my own studio. Design allows me to immerse myself in my creative process: setting up the camera, lighting, props, capturing, and editing photos. It may seem like a long and tedious process but it's why I love design. Over the pandemic, I bought a lot of candles and house plants.
Self Portraits
For my open media self-directed project, I decided to choose photography as my medium of choice. For this reason, it is one of my strengths as a designer and an artist. Photography to me is such a creative and flexible medium that allows anyone to create a work of art, but the problem I find that people do with photography is that they just take a picture and stop there. However personally my creative process doesn’t stop there, I find myself taking on more of an artistic and creative twist to my work and expand on the images I’ve taken.
Visual Metaphors
The purpose of this project was to experiment and explore different ways of associating photographs using visual metaphors that are connected in ways that are not usual or expected. When creating visual metaphors using the association between objects and subjects in the photographs, creates a visual narrative that connects each image together and uses movement, line, texture, and form. My visual narrative is a sequence of images that are associated using movement, line, texture, pattern, and different angles to create a narrative. Each image in this sequence allows the viewer’s eye to follow the natural flow of each image to lead onto the next. As well as the tonal values and the repetition of texture in each image allows for this sequence of images to be compelling to the eye and allows the audience to look closer into the details captured in each image.
Food and Drink Photography
The goal of this project was to produce a set of images using natural and studio lighting. The artichoke image was captured using studio lighting, in order to emphasize the natural textures within. The Gin and mint drink was captured using natural afternoon lighting through a window in order to grasp the beautiful texture through the mint leaves.
Moira
The purpose of this project was to create a movie poster based on the title “Moira”. The word Moira means destiny, share, and fate in Greek. Taking inspiration from the definition and the genre of horror/ thriller film movies. The purpose of having plastic wrap on the model was to create a sense of fear and endangerment as it is a poster for a horror movie, where the character fears for her life. The image for the poster has an increase in contrast, clarity, shadows, and highlights to help define the details in the photo.
