Hand colored analog photographs: 1989-1993 After years of photographing myself, playing a variety of roles as characters in my visual narratives, I started creating and incorporating hybrid creatures, combining my own image with that to other animals. The hybrid creatures allowed me to expand the range of emotions I could express, given my limited acting skills. I find these creatures to be simultaneously seductive and terrifying. I was greatly influenced by hybrid creatures in mythology and their representations in the visual arts of the 16th thru the 19th centuries, especially in the European decorative arts. These are b/w film camera original negatives combined in the darkroom, using masks. The heavily retouched combination prints are rephotographed and these negatives are used to make larger prints which, are then hand colored with oil paints. A technique which was greatly enriched by my time working as a special effects technician at a commercial photography lab, in the mid-1980’s, in Chicago.