COLLAGE EDITS – PART 2 – WEEK 7
These next series of collages were made digitally, using Adobe Photoshop to alter these images shown afterwards, of me and my face using a kaleidoscope style Instagram filter, aiming for a hybrid between an older and futuristic style, reminiscent of the very successful collages I made inspired by Spare Rib when I used imagery from that magazine. As that was successful I wanted to create a something with a similar starting point but I am still at my experimentation stage of the project and did not want to think too deeply into what I made, which can on one hand make my work more successful if I’m not overthinking things and making my work too refined and therefore lacking in character, but also I need more references within my work and be able to truly bring elements of Task 1, the practical side and Task 2. the historical and contextual side of my work to inform and balance each other’s visuals and concepts out. I chose to use imagery of myself due to the fact that I wanted to incorporate more photography, as I had done digital collages, tactile collages, and digital manipulations but none of just my own imagery and putting more of a focus on the imagery of a face, to add a narrative to the collages that could be influenced by the subject of the perceive, in this example me.
I chose myself as the subject because while I do not want to organise large elaborate shoots for my project, as that is personally not the preferred media that I work in, I still wanted to quickly trial my own images and how these can interact with each other or be developed using Adobe Creative Cloud software to either enhance the image or make them look worse potentially, as that’s what trialing work is all about. Ideas of using these Instagram filters came to my mind a while ago when I was playing around with the filters on Instagram, seeing what ones were interesting and trying to discover ones that I had not seen much of before, this led me to using the kaleidoscope filter which reminded me of a softer, feminine Petra Collins or Chloe Shepphard type of imagery, who are two of my favourite photographers, and therefore led me to seeing if this were to work well or not. I was aware that these images would not be the highest quality due to taking them on Instagram, which decreases quality, as well as using a filter, which also decreases the quality to some degree. The actual pictures that I ended up using were fairly successful to me; I wanted to keep the imagery of a face, eyes, lips, mouths and other feminine qualities if I am focusing more of femininity with the narratives and concepts surrounding that general broad theme, which has been translated into the reason why I took these images.
The last collage looks reminiscent of a surrealist painting which makes me really enjoy what I have created, as surrealist paintings have always been the root of my inspiration when creating my work, which is why I always opt for a more abstract outcome. I would love to use this as inspiration to start painting again, or even to recreate this in the form of a digital illustration! The eyes seemly being a part of both the foreground and the background with a heavy focus as them as the main part of the image really makes it more successful. The two above it are really effective in my eyes, I used an image of me looking away from the camera, as so to hide my facial expression and therefore blur the potential narrative of the image, this in combination with the almost tv static like glitched affect, as well as a mirroring affect led to a beautiful, dreamlike and surreal composition. The glitched effect works much better here than in the images inspired by hate zine, this was potentially as I spent more time refining these, utilising colour palettes and seeing what worked well in a composition, the glitch here was more reminiscent of something you would see on an old TV screen, yet the glitch in the Hate Zine images were more reminiscent of something you could make easily on an app, which once again there is nothing wrong with if it is done well but mine had looked quite rushed. Therefore, I will keep this in mind when making collages or digitally manipulating images for the future.
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