COLLAGING

I have always really liked the way collaging allows me to incorporate both texture and colour within an image and still be able to showcase it digitally without losing the interesting factor of the the texture.

Over the summer, we were tasked to make a poster that worked from 3 meters away so I thought that by using collage, I can create big, bold blocks of colour that attracts peoples' eyes to the poster. As you can see, I have chosen to put little red riding hood in the middle, smothered by the wolf. This was because I wanted to show how much impact the wolf had on the way the story unfolded. I also decided to make him predominantly big on the page as I wanted him to have a very overpowering and aggressive feel. At first, I wanted to recreate in the wolf in colour, just like how I did with Little Red Riding hood however, I felt that I needed to somehow make her stand out more - her being the main character and all. So, in the end, I decided to make everything else apart from the hood black and white. When the hood being red, apart from it standing out, it was also able to suggest how see above all else, stood out to the wolf. Hence, his obsession with her throughout the story.

Upon researching more into the story, I have came to realise that the wolf wasn't really animal but a representation of a rapist. This led me to recreate the wolf in a more fantasy-like manner as he wasn't in a sense, 'real' at all.

I really liked how the final product so much so that I would like to reproduce it using screen printing as I feel screen printing would be excellent in delivering strong bold colours that I can customise.

The lion collages were when I chose collage to help me portray the characteristics of a lion. Due to the lion being an animal mostly seen in the wild, I chose to use inorganic coloured papers, sticking mostly to browns and greys. I also added crinkled paper to the image as lions are seen as aggressive beings and so by incorporating rough texture, such aggressive acts could be represented without actually having to insert an image of a lion on a hunt. I also ended up scanning in a line drawing I did of a lion's anatomy as I felt that in order to represent the animal fully, I would have to look deeper and beyond appearance and behaviour. The line drawing added a very interesting element to the drawing as even though it was quite big, I had a lot of negative space allowing the background textures beneath to peek through but still looking dominant against them.

The pictures above were from a workshop I attended at the beginning of year 1. I benefited a lot from attending this workshop as I was introduced and shown the importance of colours and how by using one colour and/or texture, I could link various pictures together that may not contain the same subject however do surround the same subject. In this example, even though both of my outcomes do not have the same main subject i.e one being a man, the other, a mountain , they both contain brown paper and silver tape which suggest that they are related and therefore indicate that they are about the same theme.

The outcome below was also produced from the same workshop that shows the effectiveness of colour in setting the overall atmosphere of the outcome. The outcome, even though contain an image of a woman that consists of monochromatic colours, when placed next to grid paper accompanied by pink tape, looks lighter than if the same image were to be placed on a darker colour i.e black card stock.

#EDITORIAL