My Collage

           

Research/image gathering:

The location I had chosen is at the docks and the aquarium.

The main visual element of my chosen location will be the Neptune statue at the Docks, with the main theme being ‘water’. There are lots of water features in the area that I plan to use as a background, surrounding the Neptune statue.

Neptune is the god of the sea. The statue is going to be the main focus of my collage. The collage isn’t going to be related to history as such, but rather Greek mythology. Or to be more exact, just the statue itself and the relation of it to water.

I’m going to take pictures of the water features near the Neptune statue, such as the small water fountains and of course the water at the docks. I’ll go to the aquarium too and get some images of sea life to form a border around Neptune.

I will try to get all these images gathered within a week. As I have 2 weeks to have the finished product, that will leave me a week to put it all together.

Evaluation

I did a general search for all collages and collage artists for inspiration and ideas. I did have a plan before but did manage to get a few ideas, as mentioned previously in the blog.

The image gathering took 3 days (obviously not 3 whole days) because originally I think I miss-heard exactly what the brief was, thinking we needed to show a journey/route/map that we went on and the sights we saw. So the first day was somewhat wasted, although I did manage to make a rough collage of my journey. Then It took another day after college to take a load of pictures. The final day I came in to Bristol and went to the aquarium for the remainder of my images. The research took a couple of hours and so did actually putting the collage together.

In photoshop, I merged the fountains and steps together at the bottom of the collage. I had to cut out all the background around the Neptune statue and place that in the middle. All the aquarium images were then merged together and used as a background behind Neptune. Then I added a blurred underwater sort of filter and finally added a water effect/ripple layer on top of it all and made it transparent so it didn’t alter the colours but still added the look.

It was my first time using photoshop. I found it very difficult and required a lot of technical help. But at the end of the day I did manage to put my idea onto paper.

There isn’t anything that I’d want to change about the collage. It could have been done professionally in the sense that some of the images could have been merged together better, thus getting rid of the straight edges on each image. But I feel safe that I can blame it all on my lack of photoshop experience.

Overall, I’m quite happy with the final product. Like I mentioned before it could have been done better if I was skilful at photoshop. But I’m proud of the idea I had and how I managed to make an idea come a visual piece of work. Comparing it with some of the other collages I saw during my research, I think the idea itself is really good, but isn’t really up to par with them because the quality isn’t as good as it could be.