Research/Exercises
Beginning this project, I read three source materials and wound up choosing The Juniper Tree by the Brothers Grimm, a story about deception, corruption, and the evil surrounding life. I wanted to focus on this because I liked the dark nature of the story and felt it would fit well in a more abstract collage. I started to form the concepts that I wanted to show through this piece. I want to set out to portray this very dark story in a sort of fantastical scenario, as to give the piece a lot more character than if I were to just focus on solely dark elements.
The first exercise we did was to find resources that would fit our concept and described ceratain aspects of the story. This was what I gathered in this search:
I really enjoyed the imagery of the bird in the story and wanted to focus in on that a bit, so that was my main focus for the rest of my gathering after this exercise.
The next study and exercise was to focus on creating a collage to get used to the software and learn to use harmony.
I enjoyed how this turned out and it gave me some more insight into the cloning and blending tools at my disposal.
Our next exercise was focused on giving some perspective. Get it? We learned how to form a space with dimension through the use of collage. As it’s hard for me to travel right now, I chose to use my room as my subject and do a very wide focus collage of it.
This gave me a lot of insight into creating my final collage as I learned how to seamlessly embed these images together and form a coherent space, which would be the main goal of my final collage.
Production
I finally started work on my actual collage and my first step was to just get a few flat ideas down.
These were the main things I was to focus on, using the bird as a repetitive element and the act of cannibalism as a main focus, as that was a pivotal moment in the source material.
This was a slow progression upon a similar idea using space, ending up as my final. I was just building up and making subtle changes to make the piece moreso fit my concept, as well as push the realism and believability of a 3 dimensional space in this collage.
I’m happy with this final result and feel it describes my concept in an interesting way.
Final project: Interpretive Collage