Digital Collage
Program Used: Adobe Photoshop CS
Class: Media Studio: Imaging (Fall 2008)
Objective: Create a series of 3 digital sight collages of some aspect of your visual environment using a camera and a scanner and techniques of layering in photoshop. You must use only visuals which you capture yourself. You may not use visuals downloaded from the net, or from any other source.
Artist notes: For this project, we were assigned to explore the different tools used in Photoshop. In my previous experiences with Photoshop, I had strayed away from using photo filters, so I experimented with those a bit for this project.
Collage 1 - Warped Tour
I went to Vans Warped Tour during the summer of 2008 at Shoreline Amphitheatre and had an amazing experience. Seeing the band featured in the collage, The Academy Is... was a lot of fun because they put on a very energetic show. The lead singer, William Beckett was jumping around the stage, singing and dancing and pumping up the crowd, so I wanted to put that into art form. This picture is from the perspective of the audience and shows William Beckett on the stage. The crowd is rocking out below, and in the background, I took photos of my friend Take and portrayed him having such a good time that he was motivated to climb a tree! I added a gradient to recolor the sky and added some clouds from a brush I made to make it look more surreal, as that's how the concert felt like when I was there.
Collage 2 - Imagining
When I think of my friend Justus, two of the things that come to mind are graffiti and extreme sports. The photos used in this collage came from a series of photos I took of him longboarding and taking photos. I put them together to represent him taking photos of an intense trick, and shrunk another photo and put it in the distance to portray himself doing the trick. I added a different design to the bottom of both longboards shown for a different effect, and write one of my nicknames, "jinx," on the front in graffiti style for a grunge effect. The airplane in the back was from a brush I created.
Collage 3 - Homesick
I'm originally from California, and coming to New York for school made me realize how much I've missed the weather there. I live about 45 minutes away from the closest beach, and even though I never really took advantage of that luxury, it was always comforting to know that I could just get in a car and drive through the Santa Cruz mountains to the shoreline if I wanted to. My friends at University of California, San Diego, live so close to the beach that can see the coast from the windows of the top floors of their residence halls, and some even surf early in the morning before going to their first class. The only way I can experience the beach here in upstate New York is looking at the photos that I've taken over the summer on my computer. This collage shows one of those pictures, as well as a picture of my laptop keyboard to show that. Also, a picture of the parking lot that I see when I look out the north side windows of my residence hall is superimposed to show that while I can look at this picture, in the end I'm still in Troy.
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© Copyright 2007
Tiffany Hu
Product Design and Innovation 2011
