Unit 34 - Image manipulation Computer Applications

Collage 1

From the very start of this project, I knew what type of background texture I'd like my collage to have. A very gritty, grey and creepy texture that when you look at it, it gives off dull vibe.

To get this texture, I took a picture of the table that I'm sat next to and then played around with the vibrancies, glow, colour and depth to eventually get the finished texture that I wanted.











I took a walk to Brandon hill and took a picture of a tree. I'm going to try make it look as if the tree is on fire as show in one of the sketches above.












So after I uploaded the picture I took, I cropped out the background and then applied an overlay to the image to blend in into the background. Because the background texture is dark grey with harsh patterns all over it, having a bright green tree put infront of it looked a bit horrible, so I added a overlay effect which as you can see, actually worked out pretty good.

Fire was in the tree of the idea that I was going to do. Because one of my initial ideas had fire coming out from the tree.

You will notice you can see a suit in the fire, my idea was to portray my fear coming out from the fire, in my case I was trying to make a Slender-man.

I finally managed to get hold of a slender-man image to put inside the suit. I copy and pasted the image several times to give of a good effect.

Then like I described before, I put images of jump scares of my own and portrayed them underneath the tree. Since my collage is about fear, I wanted to show off fear in my scary reactions.

I ended the collage off with several text art and minor effects.



















Collage 2

For my second collage I wanted to go for something simple with a white background to make the blood the focal point of the collage.

I then decided to add fear elements of my own imbedded into the blood.

I then added text into the blood to give off a scratchy text effect.

I decided that the white background left to much empty space, so I decided to get a texture and add it into the background. Over all I think it emphases the blood even more and gives off a great effect. This is my final outcome.

Artist Critique

The artist I have chosen for my critique is Sue Coe. I feel, in my own personal opinion, that Sue relates to my work the most. Her work feels very dark and abstract which gives off the effect of terror and fear which is what I was trying to going for in my collage.

There is one particular piece of work that Sue had drawn evolving a skull; she interprets images into different parts of the skull. For example, in the image she has drawn what appears to be a pigs head peering out from the skull’s eye socket. In one of my collages that I have produce, you will see that I have actually tried to do the same thing; such has an image appearing out from a tree that has been set on fire.

If you take a look at some of Sue’s work, you will notice that most if not all posters are pretty much grey and black, this is something I can also related to in one of my pieces of work because I wanted it to have a very dull, scratchy feel to it to represent that feel of fear and terror.

The amount of detail with shading that Sue has put into the work really shows how in-depth she wishes to get the message across with certain aspects of her work. My collage is based of fear and I have included what I’m personally scared of, I wanted to give off the message that everyone’s interpretation of fear is always different. Some people find that dark gloomy places are quite scary, but others may find that the fear of not knowing something scares them. I felt that showing off own my personal fear will force people to think about what their fear is and see for their selves how much is differs.

I’ve also noticed that in her artwork, although most of it is black and grey, when there is colour, she wants you to see that first. It literally forces the eye to look straight at the colour to figure out what it going on in her drawing. With my collages, I’ve added very obvious vocal points that stand out from my background so that when people look at my work, they get forced into seeing what I mainly wanted to show.

One thing that really shone out to me was how Sue’s work is drawn as if it’s all suppose to be there. Everything that she had added into her drawings is so surreal and abstract yet fit the environment and situation that is going on. The real challenge that I felt was quite tough for me, was doing what Sue had professionally achieved which was making the abstract and surreal perfectly work together. I felt that during my work, using overlays on the images worked perfectly and simply blurring out the edges make them not seem so apparent and wrong.

Design Report

In this unit we were expected to make two collages on a particular subject of our choice, in my case, I chose fear. The reason to why I have chosen fear is because everyone expresses and interprets fear in their own way, meaning that it’s always different. I felt by making two collages on my fear, would show other people my point of view on how I feel fear is.

I didn’t want to go into this project blind, so I decided to take some time into doing a bit of research on how different people portrayed their own ideas of fear. I gathered some pictures together and annotated them explaining my likes and dislikes about the pictures I have selected and picked up a few ideas and inspirations from a few. There was one specific picture I really enjoyed annotating because the collage was just filled with a load of harsh, scratchy textures with really crooked text going all over it. I felt that portraying fear in such a schizophrenic tone gave it that added depth and atmosphere to the collage itself.

So after taking inspiration from a few other collages, I then decided tog et straight to the drawing board and start design some initial ideas on how I wish my collage to look like as a finished product. As you just read in the paragraph above, I took a huge amount of inspiration from the collage that had that schizophrenic tone and decided to make a start first on an idea based around those using different types of fear I’m scared of such as fire and The Slender-Man.

After I draw about four or five different ideas, I then decided to look at various focal points on different collages and what makes certain areas stand out more than others to get a specific message across. I saw things like, making the background of a collage completely white and then only adding simplistic ideas onto the white base in various colours that stand out.

Researching the focal points gave me another idea on what I wish my second collage to look like. I had an idea for the first one where everything is dark, gloomy with harsh textures. But now I wanted to take a gentler approach to my idea of fear and try adding fewer images and make it easier to the eye to look at. This considers of lighter colours, not overloaded with images and not too much text.

Eventually I then moved onto design various mood boards about fear. So this time I wasn’t researching collages. I felt that just limiting myself to research collages based on fear meant that I wasn’t getting the full package on other types of fear that maybe haven’t been included in collages. I found some really horrifying and interesting images and put them all together to make various mood boards.

After having all the research and annotations I felt I needed, I felt really confidant with how I wanted my final collages to look like and decided to gather the appropriate images I needed. After some hard work I finalized my two collages and printed them both off in A3 paper ready to be presented. After they were printed off, I then moved onto putting some research into a an artist named Sue Coe who has drawn various pieces of artwork that I felt related to work quite a lot and then wrote a artist critique explaining how my work related to Sue’s work.