peter nero process: first digital comps.

from my refined sketch phase, you might recall i was taking some piano birds, some camouflaged piano hands, and some rotational symmetry into the next step, which was digital. here's what came out:

we decided these pianos were a bit too sparse and simple and that i needed to add detail if i were to move one forward. the angled piano and vertically italicized type was the pick out of these two.

guest critic chuck haddix had been interested in my piano player silhouette so i tried that out, both highlighting the rotation and also downplaying it. both of these got cut.

these are, unfortunately, just photoshop mocks of my plans for this concept. the reason for this being i did not have easy access to a piano, and i believe it would be a hard sell to get somebody to let me paint some hands and then stage the photos, particularly if i hadn't yet tried the method to practice. i had begun winning permissions to photo a piano, but this concept didn't make it through either. the idea became not enough about becoming one with the keys and too much about having ghost hands.

 these compositions seemed to get more potent the less and less they contained. once i got down to the single bird and the zoomed in piano keys on blue, the composition seemed pretty strong. this was my primary new direction for the next digital set, soon to follow.