Digital Collages & Building A Texture Library
From working physically with photocopying, printing, posterising, cutting and sticking we moved to working digitally - creating digital collages and building texture libraries.
What is a texture library is the first question? It’s a library of images taken by you or others that contains images of real world places, objects, buildings, metals, woods ect that have texture or could be used in collages. So to build our own texture libraries we went outside and around the collage campus taking of pictures of anything that we thought would make good textures or could be useful for collages in the future. I came back with over 150 photos of all sorts textures, objects and buildings ready to be used and uploaded to my google drive.
After having a brief run over of photoshop, it’s various tools as well as the difference between RGB and CMYK - RGB (Red, Green, Blue) being used for digital work to make really bright vibrant colours on computer screens whereas CMYK ( Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Key, which is Black) is used for printing so your working with the same colours on the screen as when it will be printed out.
I spent a lot of time with the polygon tool cutting out a mask and then using feathering to make the cutting look smoother and to help blend it into the collage better. I decided after the mask I needed to pick a theme and drew from my A to Z project and used ‘O’ for outside and thought about what I love seeing most in nature. So it included sun rises/sunsets, forests, aqua blue oceans, mountain views.
The rest of collage was actually made up of royalty free images from various websites but mostly from pexels.com - I decided to add the shoes in a pop art style by changing the threshold of the image and placing the on top of mountain because idea of looking down from a mountain and seeing how small and insignificant seems in compassion is just so interesting to me. The hairy legs also not real they’re actually part of a wooden hoe from a royalty free image and I thought they looked like legs enough might as well use them and confuse everyone.
I really did enjoy collaging digitally mostly because it didn’t involves such chaos and mess as working physically with collages but working physically and creating a physical collage I actually prefer. This is because as you create a collage you can then go back and create it into something new by posterisng the piece and making it something completely new. I’m sure you could work similarly with digital collages but it just wouldn’t be the same because your not physically changing the scale your working with your still working on the same sized computer screen your just printing out a larger outcome.
