I went to the science museum in London with college and collected photographs of objects, people and places for research to go towards my new assignment. Today, we were asked to use images we collected to create a collage. This is our first real practical session since starting the new brief so I was excited to get stuck in.
 |
| My final collage |
I took one photo that I thought could describe one of the typical groups of consumer at the museum. An elderly man leisurely strolling and browsing at all the museum had to offer. We went on a weekday, and apart from the herds of school children, this seemed to be the main target audience. Anyway, I liked this image and really liked his silhouette so I decided to develop this and use it as my main material in the collage.
 |
| The graphite paper after continuously tracing |
I firstly traced the image of the man using graphite paper. I liked the outcome and decided to layer more but going around in a spiral. The inspiration of this was from a handout we had of photocopied science pages, one page showing a geometric spiral image with a lot of overlapping lines which is what I tried to achieve with the man. A thing I did want to pick up about the man was that in my photograph, he was carrying a Jigsaw bag which gave him a very high and respected status in my opinion as not everyone can afford to shop there. He was very well dressed and from this I came up with the presumption that he is a well to do gentleman. To translate this in the images I traced, the only detailing I gave was the Jigsaw logo on the bag he was carrying. This image of the man could very easily be changed if the man was carrying a Primark bag as that is what our society picks up on and judges when taking just a glance at strangers in the street.
 |
| Reduced down in size |
Next, I reduced the size of the tracing I did down to A5 size. I then put it through the printer again and printed it on the side diagonal to it. I wanted these images to be the base of my collage. I like how ordered the initial idea of spiralling the image seemed but how the end result is actually quite chaotic. From a quick look, it also resembles a flower which is interesting!
 |
| 1 |
 |
| 2 |
 |
| 3 |
 |
| 4 |
I then, using a photocopy from the science book of that spiral geometric shape, cut the shape up into pieces and thought about how I could incorporate them into the collage. I really liked numbers 1 and 3 so merged them together to get number 4. I like how it looks like negative space of the shape and how they each disguise different parts of the tracing I did earlier on.
I found another small shape from the page but I didn't feel like it fitted anywhere when i tried to position it on the page.
Using the idea of circles, I decided to cut out 3 circles from the centre of the tracing of the man which was the chaotic section and re arrange these on the page. I didn't really like where I positioned them as they didn't look right in the white space on their own. When i had them overlapping the other geometric shapes from earlier seen below, I found that they looked much better and even started to remind me of science as it looked like something from the science based sitcom 'The Big Bang Theory!'
Lastly, I photocopied the reverse image of the man that was created when I was tracing and placed him in different positions on the page. As it was a reverse image, it meant that the lettering on the jigsaw bag is back to front which I think is the only problem. I thought that multiple images looked better and kept with the little theme of repetition that I had going on. I also like that the photocopier picked up on some smudges on the paper from the graphite as it gives the collage some tone. One thing that I think it needs is colour. I could perhaps work into it in the future, it could look nice to work into it using thread as it would give the collage some texture and colour at the same time.
I am very happy with the work I created today and surprised that it took me no longer than 2 hours. It's so easy to re arrange images on a page, and without glueing anything down, you can never mistake and can keep shuffling and adding things until you find the perfect outcome.
