Graphic design involves creativity, technology and…attention to detail. Artists can spend hours or days sitting at computers while they work on a piece.
Bonzeye Studio is in the heart of Rapid City’s bustling Downtown. A black sign on the side walk advertises ‘local, handmade art and gifts’. Light streams into the building through a wall made of windows. Display tables line the room, showing off stickers and jewelry. Images of the Black Hills hang above them. Bonny Fleming is the owner of the gallery. She made most of the art work in the building.
Lockett: “What ways do you express your creativity?”
Fleming: “All of them. My mom was a puppeteer. She and her sister had a traveling puppet company. My dad is a crazy artist and graphic designer himself. So I’ve always said that I didn’t really have a choice. The arts are in me and I was always encouraged to just do whatever I could and I excelled at a lot of it. I excelled at drawing and painting and sculpture a little bit here and there. But I like to do things I’m good at so this is where my heart is.”
Fleming has been doing graphic design for nearly 15 years. One of her series combines portraits of animals with landscapes.
Fleming: “I call it the Synthesis series because when I first started exploring it, what was really amazing to me was finding the way that nature duplicates itself or mimics itself in both the very small to the very big. How much the forest looks like fur on a buffalo’s back or feather’s down a raven’s back.”
Fleming takes all of the pictures herself. The landscapes are edited onto the animals to create surreal images with outlines of buffalo and birds fading into nature.
Fleming: “It’s really like it sounds. So if you took a stack of photos you had sitting on your desk and you put a buffalo photo down there and then sitting next to it you have a photo of some aspen trees and you could think of it like you get your x-acto knife and you cut out those trees and you lay it on top of the buffalo. With Photoshop I have the ability to kind of make that photo a little bit more translucent. So there’s some benefits to using the computer but really you can think of it like making a collage but digitally.”
It takes her anywhere from five hours to several months to complete a piece. Fleming scrolls though hundreds of pictures on her computer that she uses for compositions. She opens an image of a bird with glimmering blue feathers.
Fleming: “This is the original photo I started with which was a bird at Legion Lake, and it let me get really close to it which was neat…”
Fleming clicks through small buttons shaped like eyes on Photoshop and the picture starts to change. The first clicks transform the scenery.
Fleming: “The first thing I’ll do is put on a background kind of texture for it to kind of sit on. Here’s the Black Hills behind there…”
She shows where she added hills then covered them with clouds. It looks like they’re covered in a thick fog.
Fleming: “And then I start layering the elements onto the bird itself. So up here, this is where I started, was right on his face. So this is a view of Bear Butte. The colors match…”
This click reveals a small image of a mountain right above the bird’s eye.
Fleming: “So then we kind of start to move down the back. Another photo of the ocean looking down on it from a cliff…”
Ocean waves start to move down the animal’s wings.
Fleming: “There you see there’s a pool with some rocks and the water flows down in here. And so that starts out our waterfall down the birds back. And then down here, we add in that ripple that…”
The texture of the feathers blends together with these small images until the water looks like a part of the bird.
Fleming: “Some of these are subtle but they add in as you keep building. And that goes into the piece of driftwood there on the wing and then…”
She clicks through the final layers adding drift wood and rocks.
Fleming: “So that ends us up from starting with the bird that we started with to that, there.”
The landscape Fleming created by combining multiple pictures looks natural. She says she’s spent more than 24 hours working on this image…and is not done yet. The Synthesis can be seen at Bonzeye Studio and Mathews Opera House in Spearfish.