Collage research.

Alright so at some point in pretty much every artists life...well at least I think, we have had to do a collage. It started of with just experiments of all kinds of things that a person could use to create one. At first they were just aimless creations to see how certain elements interacted with each other. In college though, one of my assignments was to express a question through a collage. So I chose "what is passion?", this time it couldn't just be many different pictures all mashed into one thing. They all had to have a common theme, and colour scheme, or else the message wouldn't really get through. This collage work showed me that a person doesn't necessarily have to make a great painting or drawing to get their message across, and that a collage could get it's point across just as successfully. It's gonna be interesting working with this kind of artwork again. I haven't done one since my first year in college, and that was two years ago.

When I think of collage, I just thought of, alright, choose the right pictures and place them in interesting ways to make it as visually appealing and interesting. I hadn't really thought of where it came from, when it started, or which regions of the world used it first. Th articles brought a new light on my view of this artform, I didn't even think of making a collage with wood. There are soo many different ways to make a collage. Recently for my web in sites class, we made a montage. Which is technically a branch of the many things a collage can be.

This kind of artwork gives people the liberty to show whatever they want, and manipulate images that may mean something at first and then, just by the way a person places them, can mean something completely different, that what's so amazing about the versitility of this means. Who knew that something so simple could be so amazingly complex and branch out so much. That artists could be famous for their type of collage. What we could do with collage is endless, and has become extremely simplified with the likes of photoshop, flash and well anything to do with the computer.

However tommorrow's class we're going to have to work by traditional means, which is pretty great, because I love being hands on, although I'm in a computer emphasized program, I started of with traditional roots and appreciate that it's an important factor for the whole basis of all artwork. So the challenge is on for us to make something that can be so open, but being constrained with the materials we bring, because after all we can't constantly press undo. Once it's on..it's on.


Here are some of the collage examples I found, the last one is from an artist who's last name is hoelscher, and is the one I like the most. It's the most colourful one and the one that caught my eye first.

The Map

This week we had to make a map that somehow represented ourselves, it could have been about anything, so I decided to map out my nightlife, what I do and how often. The colours represent what day of the week they happen, and depending what type of line is on the stroke of colour, it means how often I go there. I love vector work, so I guess you could say I attempted to recreate it traditionall with trying to keep the lines the least sketchy as possible.

I actually enjoyed this very much, because we got to apply all the techniques we have learned with Pata into an open project where I got to choose at what angle we wanted to approach the presentation of the project.



Forgive me for the poor quality of the photo, however the flatbed scanner was not available so I had to take a photo of it. I will try again tomorrow to scan it, but, it is up nonetheless.

COLOURS!!!!

So this weeks class consisted of colour theory, which i actually happen to like. Colour usually ends up being a very important factor in all the art I do. Well at least the pieces that are done for me. Especially since in college my painting teacher put such an emphasis on learning how to properly use colour. So in college she made us do the whole colour wheel using the three basic colours: red, Blue, annnndd yellow! Yah it was a challenge, she also made us add white to all of the colours and black. Oh and we can't forget the greyscale, here it is freshly done for cart 254:

And here is my monochromatic scheme for red:

Now with all the newly, or refreshed colour theory we just ingested we were asked to make our own compositions using complementary colours, monochromatic, and a choice of warm or cool colours.(i chose cool)

FONTS

So this week was all about text fonts and how to make them. Once again I underestimated how much work went into making these things. The fact that you could make one letter really nicely doesn't exactly mean that you could make the whole alphabet. So it's a whole process of looking at the letters as a whole, and if the different combinations we use to make words will look good together. So I the one I made in class was organic, I used curved lines instead of linear ones. Then when I got home I thought of a extremely complex one to do. For now I'm posting the ones I did in class and a quick version of a word, that means princess in italian. I intend on making a better one later on tonight.