PHOTO COLLAGES

Paper Collage

For my first collage I choose this image which I took of my friend through a glass window. I then tour pieces of paper with different sayings in them. The first piece of paper says: "She didn't stop" and then second says: " Hide yourself from the world. Don't show your true emotions. Don't let them see you crumble. Rise above it all". I choose to write these as it is a sort of personal meaning to me and other people. I was trying to look at how many teenagers these days see themselves and how many have different problems and they choose not to show it. It's a basic concept but with a lot of personal meaning.

My second collage is again looking at teenagers and i wrote on it: "Society killed the teenager". Which basically means that society's views on what it perfect and acceptable has been distorted to this image which many teenagers aspire to be, and it's ridiculous as many go to extreme lengths to look the way society tells them to look. I added the coloured paint and dripped it down the photograph to get this distorted and messy look. I choose the colours red, white and black because, the white shows the purity of the teenager, the black is society and the red is all the life's that have been lost at trying to have this perfect image. The dripped method worked really well as it merged all the colours together creating this sense of confusion and chaos, which was what I was trying to achieve.

My third collage image is of a double exposure which I did, which came out with this ghostly effect and then I cut into it with a scalpel. I cut out random different sections of the photograph and then I got white tissue paper, scrunched it and made a sort of border around the edges of the photograph. This collage had no meaning, I merely did what I thought would look okay and I think this didn't come out too bad, I really like the ghostly effect of the photograph and I think it goes well with the tissue paper.

Digital Collage

For my first digital experiment I did this one inspired by Vasilisa Forbes. Since I cant access Photoshop at home I used a simple photo editor online to create this. I just choose basic geometric shapes, in this case rectangles. And placed them around the image. I then faded them a little to make them see through like Forbes's. I think this technique works best on black and white photographs as you can have different coloured shapes and it makes them stand out a lot more.

For my second digital experiment I used this photograph of a man on his phone, which I took when I went up to London. Again using the same photo editor I made the made the image black and white which again I think helps the cut outs to stand out more if they are against a neutral background. I then found these different papers on the actual site and put those onto the photograph and then wrote on them with the text option that the site provides. It also has another option in which you can overlay another photograph, so I did so with the love letter on the bottom left. I just googled love letters and found that one and overlaid it on top and then again faded the image a little for the see through affect. I then just added another plain rectangle in the bottom corner to finish off the look. I took inspiration from Emidio Bernadrdone who uses simple cut outs of various different papers and overlays them on top of each other.

For my final digital collage I did this piece inspired by an artist I found on my pinterest named April Deacon. I find her work very beautiful and very creative and I tried my best to somewhat recreate that digitally. I choose this photograph of my niece which I had taken earlier in the month. Using the same photo editor I choose the basic geometric shapes and began to place them all around her face, I used bigger circles for larger areas of the face and then smaller circles for a little detail. It took a while to do and it did get a little tedious so it is definitely not the best it can be and also if I had been using a better editing system it would also help, but for an experiment I thought it worked really well. I really like this technique and it is one I may consider to do further, although I think doing it by hand may make it a lot easier.