Contextual Studies - Collages

Because of the weather i was unable to carry on with my physical collages as the college was closed and i had no access to a printer, i decided to carry on with creating digital collages. 

I have been looking at Dada / Surrealism collages and using artists from both to help inspire collages. I found a pull more towards the idea of surrealism collages, using elements of dreams or fantasy as inspiration.

I really enjoyed making collages that combined pre 1960 photography and more modern images. I started by looking through images and finding inspiration from it, then working on top of that.  

I try to let my imagination go as much as i can with these, i think about position of up and down, sky, space, sea, land and people and the role they play around us, i then try to move it around, creating layers that make images.

It is ,in a way, a lot easier to make physical collages because of the cutting and cropping. if i find an image i want to use cropping it on photoshop can be tricky compared to printing it out and cutting it myself...

In saying that it is obviously easier to create digital collages when it comes to scale, colour and materials...

Some of these images don't work at all because they are stretched out, and that has to do with my settings on my at home computer the way my desktop was set up to fit in my monitor, its something i didn't notice until i switched back to my laptop... 

This one i was trying to create something that looked more like a physical collage, i was trying to create a sense of depth. I also used images of scrapped/ torn paper. I like the outcome of this image it seems more seamless than the others. 

Max Ernst 's collages are very seamless, the cutting and sticking skill is very good.  I like his collages because of this. The images you are looking at look almost real. They are completely strange but they look like they are meant to look that way. Mine can be very jagged, even digitally i struggle to make things look like they are correct so to speak. 

These collages are a series of images put into a book called a week of kindness. it is made of 182 collages using illustrations from Victorian comics, books and novels. 

I liked the idea of creating work from comics...Iand making changes to it, i started by taking images from the walking dead comic books.

I really like these but i what i liked about Ernst's collages is that they were so smooth, i decided to try them in black and white and see if they looked any better like that. 

I then wanted to look at how he uses animals in his work with humans and wanted to create some collages more in my style with animals and figures. For fun. 

This one is by far my favorite image, i was looking more at Dada collages and i actually liked the introduction of word.  Its something i did not think of before. 

I swing more towards surrealism as a base for collage because i find it more satisfying, cleaner in a way than Dada. 

I wanted to play with that idea a little....

I really enjoy making these digital collages, like i said i could make them all day, i would love to print them off on a large scale as i think they would look so interesting... i was planning to do some bigger scale physical collages but obviously i couldn't...

I find there is something about cutting and sticking physical images that i really enjoy i feel a bigger connection with the work and i am not as picky about size.... I find it very therapeutic to make these.