Digital Collage

These four collages were created with a specific goal in mind and represent my first steps into making visual art using digital tools. They were very challenging at first, I spent an absurd amount of time mucking about with different versions of collage A, in part because the image of my friend Jake was special to me, but also because I didn't really know my way around Photoshop. After becoming familiar enough to know what my go-to methods were to get the kind of look I wanted, things started to pick up and the following 3 collages were a little faster to put together. The most technically involved was definitely the Ibex/Dam illusion in Collage B. Despite that, the simplicity of Collage C with Edmonia Lewis and a simple backdrop of storm clouds still draws me in, I'm proud of that one. In all four of them, I really enjoyed using the "brush stroke" effect to try and make differences in resolution, texture, and contrast come together a bit more, this seems to be mostly successful though I'd love to learn alternate ways of achieving this.

Collage A: This was created from a set of home-images and meant to acknowledge the passing of a good friend who died in a motorcycle accident at the start of the summer of 2020. He was a wonderful goofball and I think of him often and will miss him forever.

Collage B: A combination of an actual top-down image of salt-licking ibex scaling a dam with superimposed ibex standing on it as if it's a flat surface. Oh, and some covid-safe theme-parking.

Collage C: An image of Edmonia Lewis, a genius sculptor from the 19th century. The goal here was to imitate the textures of Maggie Taylor's found collage work using found photographs and skyboxes.

Collage D: For fun, The soldiers of Kirosawa's RAN storm the fields of Miyazaki's Nausicaa. Contains the kind of ubiquitous Emergency Station, not quite to scale for either company.

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