Collages

For this project, we had to use personal and web images to create two collages using photoshop.

Personal Images Collage

Web Images Collage

Scroll for Creative Process

Personal Process

For my personal process, I really wanted to emphasize this process of unleashing your inner creativity. I wanted to play with desaturation vs, heavily saturated and I wanted to convey the idea of your creativity being released from your skull. I got these lovely pictures from around elon and mellow mushroom, and I used the ideas displayed in the youtube video below. Here are also some of the collages that initially inspired me and that I looked at frequently to figure out placement of images and color theory.

Inspiration 1

Inspiration 2 - Incidentally a gin advertisement

These are the photos I took for the personal project, and I worked a lot with layering and masking the images together, along with adjusting hue and saturation, to get the images to look like they were coming out of my head. It was also really fun to use the liquify filter on the mushrooms to experiment and make them look like they were melting or growing out of my head.

After Hue/Saturation & Before Liquify

After Liquify

Web Images Process

This next collage was actually inspired by my first. You saw above that squirrels feature in my first project, well they take over my second. The premise is "What if squirrels ran Elon?" In some ways they actually do. During my first or second week of classes my first year, I had a remarkable encounter with a squirrel.

I was walking in the cross-section of the under the oaks area, and I stopped. A squirrel had stopped a few feet away, looked at me, and proceeded to flatten their entire body against the sun-warmed bricks. I had never seen a squirrel do that, or be so willing to get close to me. Me being me, I was like, "ok," turned around walked back around the edge of the oaks area rather than disturb the squirrel in the sunshine.

I've never had an in-person semester at Elon during the spring, but the squirrels come back in full swing, and they still don't mind sharing their territory. The squirrels at Elon make it very clear that this is their home and we're just living in it.

I got my inspiration for this from Kate Cuthbert and her beautiful, minimalist collage designs. Here's a sample. Her head-swapping idea is kinda what sparked this whole thing of "what if squirrel were students," and it was the most fun I've had just going nuts with everything. Below are the images I used: