I got my second shot!

Presently blurry and sore and incandescently happy.

I am making a collage post about it; that will be up shortly.

52 Card Project 2021: Week 13: Vaccine II

This is my thirteenth collage of the year, which means that I'm 1/4 of the way through the project. Some preliminary conclusions:

I REALLY like doing this, and I have no trouble believing I will finish out the year. I had said at the beginning of the year that I planned to print the images out and paste them to cards, as I did the last time I tried this project. I started with digital collages, and although I thought at the beginning I might do some traditional ones, now I think I will do digital collages throughout the year and probably will not print them. The reason is that now that I am using digital tools, I'm playing a lot with transparency, and that just doesn't turn out well when I try to print, at least on the printers to which I have access.

As I said in my last post, I got my second Moderna shot. I don't feel great, but I am so, so happy. The conception of this card seems blindingly obvious to me: I got the shot yesterday, and today is the first day of Passover. Not a holiday I usually celebrate, but Fiona has several housemates who are Jewish, and they have very kindly invited me to join their Zoom Seder tonight, which I plan to do (although I will probably spend most of it lolling on the couch with my eyes at half-mast)

The background is taken from a still of the movie "Prince of Egypt," which the girls loved to watch as they were growing up, showing the appearance of the Angel of Death which manifests as a ghostly apparition hovering over the darkened buildings. I overlay that with a different artist's conception of the Angel of Death, and below and parallel to that, I put a Covid vaccine syringe (I'd taken a picture of the actual syringe used for my vaccine, but it did not turn out very well, so instead I used a standard stock photo). I debated placing the syringe cross-ways over the angel, (like the circle with a slash through it often placed over symbols to indicate "no...." I also debated using a picture of a doorway marked with blood on the lintel posts, with syringes overlaid over the markings of blood.

But in the end, I just placed the syringe parallel to the Angel, with the angle of the Angel's sword mimicking the placement of the syringe's needle. The meaning isn't quite parallel, because the Angel uses the sword to kill, whereas the needle protects AGAINST the Angel. But in the end, aesthetics won out. I flipped the image of the background, too, so that the Angel as represented by the mist also matches the angle of the Angel in the foreground. Edited to add: Huh, I also just noticed that (entirely coincidentally) it's at about exactly the same angle as the syringe in "Vaccine I."

I'm pretty pleased with this one.

I had decided at the beginning of the year that the cards would have one-word titles. Yes, I'm cheating by making the last vaccine shot "Vaccine I" and this one "Vaccine II." Bite me. If I hadn't decided that, the title of this card would be the caption I put at the top: "Let the angel of death pass by."

Vaccine II



Click here to read about the 52 card project and see the year's gallery.