Commercial Practice: Collage Day 1

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On the first day of this project we were tasked with creating mood boards based on elements personal to us. For this I chose a variety of themes I really enjoyed which I felt initially would provide me with good context to work on my collages from.

The themes I chose to collect images for included cottage core, symbols, exploration, survival and textures. I chose to leave my available themes slightly larger for the collection of these images in order to gather reference material and inspiration for my own designs. I felt if I condensed my searches too much to begin with I would have struggled with this project to think of interesting concepts and compositions, due to this I feel confident with the images I have collated so far and would love to create some initial experiments.

However, in the end I’m not as impressed with the final results I managed to achieve creating these experiments before my research, as I feel I was working from too blank a slate in terms of understanding this method of illustration. I chose to leave the concepts and themes rather open for these initial experiments so I could explore what worked well and what didn’t.

For my first attempt I had thought of adding traditionally drawn elements as I felt this could look super interesting in creating a fully fleshed environment. I chose a style which was extremely simplistic and vibrant to match the location of the forests, I thought the contrast in colours would work well, but honestly I don’t like this collage. I feel the components are messy and don’t work very well together. Perhaps if I had chosen a darker theme the concept of the hunter stalking the oversized bee may have worked better. There are just a lot of elements I feel could have been improved on this, such as I could have made the shiny texture a flower rather than circle to really play with scale and structure.  

My second attempt I wanted to experiment with text and patterns, to do this I chose to merge photos of my pets to create a new, strange looking creature to attempt humour by the ‘meow’ at the top considering it is clearly trying to portray a cat despite its dog body. Once again I’m not sure how much I like the style of composition for this experiment. I tried to fill the image by using borders; however I feel the overall design looks rather basic, although it could work well as an off-brand birthday card! I do however really like the way I formed the text for this experiment and would be extremely interested in experimenting with this technique again as I feel it really helped enhance the overall design.

For my third design I wanted to re-attempt the concept of having strangely built animals, whilst exploring a much more interesting composition style. To do this I merged my family’s dogs with much more random components like a teddy bear body and snail head. This was to fit in with the chosen theme of space for this design, as I felt it helped make sense of the randomly floating creatures if it were perceived they were in space. I used my own textures for this design and I like how they worked for the planets, but once again I feel this could have been improved. Perhaps I need to work on my concepts more before committing to a particular layout.

Taking these improvements into consideration, for my final initial experiment I decided to work with secondary images from magazines rather than my own collated imagery to see if this worked better as I feel the availability of printing materials resulted in my initial 3 experiments being fairly constricted, due to this I decided to go and gather some more material in order to support this project and this final initial experiment.

I found this design super funny for its double entendre, obviously the concept was based around Easter and going on a date with a loved one, the text says ‘Tuck In’ in reference to both the food and the overly glamourized date. This was to make note on how women feel the need to over present themselves at times especially for occasions like a date, however taking a funny spin on it by suggesting the individual has made a humorous appearance instead, emphasised by their partner looking exasperated. I found this design super funny and found it worked a lot better than my initial attempts. I would love to explore another design fuelled by secondary imagery from magazines as I found it really fun taking inspiration from the available resources to create a concept. However I feel it’s probably important to complete some research before attempting anymore designs in order to support my stylistic choices.

 

Attempt 1: 

Attempt 2:

Attempt 3:

Attempt 4:

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