A collage is an art piece created from many different materials. The first artists who made collages would use any material that could be pasted or attached to a surface like stamps, rope, and even gingerbread. Artists which were called the Berlin Dada group used photomontages to address politics and societal ideas. A photomontage is a collage composed only of photographic material. Although my collage is in a digital format, I used both photographic and physical materials. Physical coins and a ticket stub were scanned and placed in my piece. There is also a postcard and a map in my collage which I found online. The rest of the images were photographs which I also found online, except for the sunflowers which were part of a photograph I took. I made my piece both a collage and photomontage.
In the book “Graphic Design: The New Basics,” we read about layers. I incorporated many layers into my completed image. The area in my design where layers are most apparent is in the postcard. Here I cut out pieces of the postcard to show the map behind. This gives the image a more 2D feel, a crafty look, and incorporates both of the images together. In the postcard, I also put in a new background scene of mountains which was not there originally. This gives the image more depth and dimension and incorporates the naturalism technique. The naturalism contrasts nicely with the cut-out parts of the postcard showing the map. This was my favorite part of my collage.
Direction and balance play an important part in my image as well. As we learned in the reading, horizontal direction creates feelings of calmness and stability. I used horizontal direction mainly at the base of my image. I placed many of my images at the bottom to create a sense of stability. I also placed my images so that the piece looked balanced to the viewers. For example, placing the flowers and camera in the bottom left-hand corner, balanced out the hotel building in the center-right.
I focused my piece around the 1980s and tried to convey the feeling of a utopia. I used 1980s imagery to show that my piece was set in the 80s. The MGM hotel, old black and white picture of the girl, and the Nikon camera are all from the 1980s. I placed a ticket stub from a Star Wars film to reference Ready Player One. The book is all about 1980s pop culture, like books, music, video games, and movies. I am a big Star Wars fan and two Star Wars films came out in the 80s so I thought it would be a perfect personal piece to add to my collage. I used the lasso tool and the content aware fill tool to remove the date of 2015 from the ticket stub since it would take away from the 1980s theme. I then moved “Sun Dec 20” over to make it centered. I did this by using the “content aware move tool”. I also added a hot air balloon and sunflowers because they gave me a sense of utopia, and the added color also made my piece visually pleasing.
I really loved working with Photoshop since there are so many creative techniques possible. I used the magnetic lasso tool to trace the parts of the images I wanted to cut out. I then used the vector mask tool on all of the images which was a new feature to me, but I loved how it worked. After I cut out the images I went back over them with the paintbrush tool to erase the pixels which the magnetic lasso tool left behind. I did this by painting with black on the vector mask. I also used this technique to cut away parts of the postcard to show the map behind, as well as place the mountain scene in the background of the postcard. There was definitely a lot of trial and error here. I added filters on a few of the images to make them blend in better with the other images or to give them more contrast so they were not as flat. Overall I really like how my collage incorporated the idea of utopia and the 1980s into one image.