Toxic

At the beginning of this project I intended to model my collage after the work of British artist Duncan Mackay; as my collage progressed I strayed from his style a little bit. Duncan Mackay creates simple collages, focusing on techniques of image taking/making, material, and politics. Although my piece is a bit more barren than his are, I think it lends to my theme.

I tried to use many different types of images in my piece. I scanned many images, including: the cigarettes, lighter, "clouds"(moldable plastic beads), "smoke"(torn cotton), and "Water"(fabric). I also chose to use both personal photographs and images found online.

I tried to avoid too much editing in this piece because I wanted the drastic images to really speak for themselves. I believe the only things I did were play with opacity a little bit and apply a ripple filter to my "oil spill."

My goal in this piece was to represent the harmful things we use in our everyday lives and some of the repercussions they can have.

If I had more time to work on this project I probably would have a adjusted some of the scaling, as it seems a bit off. I also would have worked harder to make the images on the horizon appear to be buildings, because I don't think thats how they're reading.

Overall I'm pretty happy with how "Toxic" turned out.

Collage Project

Surrealist Collage Artists-Sarah Eisenlohr

Sarah Eisenlohr is a Surrealist Collage Artists. I got inspiration from her. So I made Surrealist Collage.

Astray

         For this collage, I used my moccasins and the fur from one of my ferrets as my two original images. I used the clone stamp to create the fur sections, which I used as "grass" in the picture. I decided to make everything transparent to some degree, excluding the map in the background, and I edited the saturation and color of most of the images to portray the nostalgic, somber mood I was aiming for. I used two wampum belts in place of a sky and used spears to create the border in the upper corners.
          A lot of my inspiration for this project came from William Steiger, who uses quite a bit of maps in his work, and who also experimented with the same color scheme, such as in this water tower collage of his. Before creating his collages, he takes a photo of the subject matter he uses in his collages, sometimes using maps of the locations of the subjects as the background of the collages.

The Beauty of Friendship

Originally, I wanted to model my collage after the work of Gemma Leys--her work gave a warm feeling and it reminded me of the great friendship I have with Chaviely (my best friend featured in my collage). However, I opted to change my collage from the sepia tone that I had to the normal tonal scale it had. With that, I searched again for possible artists. It was not easy by any means, and the only one that I found that came close was Richard Hamilton. Through this project, I was able to observe the many different types of collages and learn that the way I first learned collage is far from the only or best way to do it.

This collage contains letters that Chaviely has sent me as well as some images of ones I have sent her. The background is of a bridge in Duluth, MN where we spent some time on my 17th birthday. Most of the drawings are hers, although a few are mine. This collage is filled with memories of a great friendship.

Collage

For this collage I gathered various textures and patterns from around my home. The white of the clouds and the green grass are both blankets. I put a mask of a green skirt over the grass blanket for extra texture to create the underlying lines and wave like semblance. Gondor is a jewelry box and the figure riding toward it is an model of Gandalf and Pippin on horseback. The flowers surrounding the frame are all hair clips that I masked over with the textures and patterns I gathered. I also altered the brightness/contrast/saturation/vibrance/highlights and shadows for most of the objects I put into the collage. I used the clone stamp tool along the grass and clouds to blend together the areas of "rolling" clouds and grassy plains to make it more realistic. I altered the opacity on the flowers to have the petals show through the patterns. I also used the quick selection tool in order to grab all of the objects I used in the collage as well as the free transform to alter the shape.

Silvio Alvarez Collage Artist

I couldn't take just one of his Examples, because they are all just so amazing.