In Teach Your Children Well, I had a different approach. Rather than starting with people in poses and putting them together, I started with an idea and found people to put into it. I knew that I wanted a picture of an innocent child being influenced by an unsavory part of the culture. In this case, military glory. So I had to set out to find the posers. Since I don't have much knowledge of what a soldier looks like in battle, carrying a gun, I turned to tv and movies as a source because that is such an abundant source. I found a tv series called Over There and rented an episode on Netflix. I actually watched it even though it was the sort of show that I hate every thing about. Using a screen capture app, I went through it frame by frame and collected a lot of images that I thought would be suitable, finally settling on this one. So I had the soldier and the sand. Once again, a picture of a grandchild appeared in my email that fit in perfectly. The child was a girl, sitting on a rock and not holding a toy gun. I had to look on the Internet again for the image of a toy gun. It turns out that there are more realistic toy guns on the market that I could ever have imagined. So I changed her into a boy, put the gun into her hands and sat her down on the sand. I think this picture has a sort of dream like quality which I tried to achieve by blurring the soldier a bit. It differers from much of my work because it is simple in structure. It is my favorite in this group, though.
