A Journey Called Collage

Week 3 March 28, 2007

Principles and Inspiration of Collage
Elements of Choice, planning your collage

The Process:

There was masking, blending modes and opacity used. I worked between Painter X and PhotoshopCS2. I found that sometimes in Painter, after working at masking away some background, then trying an effect, or plug-in, then undoing the masking was lost! I love using Painter but for masking, I much prefer Photoshop! I am of the belief that using Painter for what it does best along with Photoshop and what it does best, is the best combination.

Collage 1

Inspiration came quite slowly and with difficulty this week. I gathered images and created backgrounds, started several collage but was not pleased with any results. On Monday, my little cat, Celia, came to the end of her life. She had been suffering for a couple of years from Thyroid disease and it finally caught up with her. She died as I held her, wrapped in a towel, in the car on the way to the vet. I then wanted to make a collage to remember her.

Elements: I chose the elements in Cel's collage as symbolic of some of the things that represent her and the reason for the collage. The clocks represent that her time came to its natural end, the lace her delicate beauty, the flowers the cycle and balance of nature. I used also the image of the bare trees (and foot bridge, symbolic in this collage) that I had used in the collage of the Groweth Young for Week 2.

Clicking the image of the collage will open it in a larger view.

Collage 2

The second collage was an 'inspiration' which came as I browsed through images I have on my hard drive, some from stock.xchange , a free photo site, and some of my own capture. (Images used in these collage have no copyright restrictions.)

Elements:

I was wanting a suitable environment for the goldfish and found in a folder of textures, which I have saved over time, some velvet images and peacock feathers which looked as if they would be great candidates for blending modes! I used masking to remove the fish's background, Magic Combine blending for the feathers and fish and Darken to blend the fabrics. I used the Plug-in, Liquid Metal, to draw some lines to highlight the folds in the fabric. I also applied a small amount of Lighting.

I was hoping that the peacock feathers would resemble an aquatic bunch of foliage through which the fish are swimming, the soft folds of the fabrics to represent movement, light and shadow in the water .

Clicking the image of the collage will open it in a larger view.