Digital Collage
"A New Day"60.96x91.44cm
Photoshop September, 2016 Exhibition Text: "A New Day" was created to represent a new start, a new beginning, and the ability to overcome a bad situation. It represents the fact that while you will always carry the burden of pain from the past, with every passing day you will get better and will always find the light at the end of the tunnel. “A New Day” is a digital collage, inspired by Andy Warhol's Soup Cans. |
Art Inspiration My inspiration for the digital collage was Andy Warhol, an artist known for his influence on the Pop art movement. The Pop Art movement began in 50’s Britain, and spread to the United States in the late 1950’s. The Pop Art Movement’s goal was to go against the mainstream and to contradict the traditional way that art was created and looked at. Warhol used a wide variety of mediums, including painting, printmaking, photography, drawing, and sculptures.Warhol used bright and primary colors in his work.While using all these mediums Warhol would blur the lines between fine art and mainstream aesthetics. Some works of art that display this are: Campbell’s Soup cans, dollar bills, Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley and Coca-Cola bottles. These pieces of work were some of his most iconic American images and objects. I was inspired by his iconic American images for my digital collage, with "Campbell’s Soup Cans" being my main inspiration. I was inspired by the repetition that he uses in his pictures and wanted to do something similar to in my own artwork, so I put it in my digital collage. I especially liked his purpose behind the repetition as well.
1.CELEBRITY FUN FACTS | CelebrityFunFacts.com. (n.d.). Retrieved October 05, 2016, from http://www.celebrityfunfacts.com/andy-warhol/f23w33/ 2. J. (2013, February 13). 10 Andy Warhol Facts. Retrieved October 05, 2016, from http://primaryfacts.com/818/10-andy-warhol-facts/ 3. B. (2016, June 6). Andy Warhol Biography. Retrieved October 05, 2016, from http://www.biography.com/people/andy-warhol-9523875 Andy Warhol. (n.d.). Retrieved September 29, 2016, from http://artobserved.com/artists/andy-warhol/
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Meaning
Life is not always what it seems to be on the outside. People usually only see what is on the outside, so it's rare for them to see what's within. When I was younger I would have been labeled as popular, as I had a lot of friends that I assumed I could depend on when life got hard, and I had a great line of communication with my family. However, in 5th grade everything changed. I started to pull away from everything as I became older, as society began to view me with a judgmental lens. The worst part was that as they insulted me, I believed them. I knew that I really met the normal standards. I became very self conscious about the way I dressed and the things I said, and it wasn't just society that made me think negatively about myself. I was also bullied by someone who I had considered my friend.
I soon joined those who told me that I would never be good enough for anything in life. I told myself I wasn't pretty because I'm not skinny, and that I wasn't smart because I had problems with spelling and reading. Things just kept adding up, and in that same year I was officially diagnosed with a learning disability. At that point my world just stopped. I felt stuck. I pulled away from my family and friends and became more interpersonal. I never shared anything anymore. I bottled up my emotions, and that definitely didn't help my self-image. I had negative thoughts and feelings replaying and running through my head. I moved schools and made new friends but nothing was ever the same. I didn't open up or become me again just because the bully was gone. Society was still putting negative feelings in my head. I never smiled the way I used to. My smiles were never genuine, but no one ever knew. They only saw what I let them see, no one ever even saw the true me anymore. I was being the person that I thought the world wanted me to be. But being that person wasn't making me happy at all. In 2015, I was online when I found a quote that changed my whole world for the better. “When you have nothing to believe in, believe in yourself.” I realized that I needed to love and believe in myself before I can see all the people that loved and believed in me. I started to open up and share the feelings that I had kept bottled up for so long. The wall that had been built to separate me from the rest of the world had started to come down, brick by brick. I am never going to be the person I used to be, but someday I hope to be at least close to her. Admittedly, the wall is still there, but there are holes in it. I don't feel like I always have to act happy and loving for people to accept me. I've started to accept that I will never be perfect but no one ever is and that yes, I have flaws, but the flaws are the things that make me beautiful and I should be proud of who I am. "The Fascinating Story behind Andy Warhol's Soup Cans | Art | Agenda | Phaidon." Phaidon. N.p., n.d. Web. 13 Sept. 2016.
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Planning
Pictures use to create the Digital Collage
Process / Experimenting
I started this project by first creating my two planing sketch. Then I needed to take the pictures for the project. After I finished all that I was ready to manipulate these pictures to create the digital collage. I started by opened a new file in Photoshop, and changing the dimensions to be 24 inches by 36 inches to meat the requirements. I was also required that there was a resolution of 170 pixels per inches. I then opened all of the pictures above and began to playing with the images. I used the quick select tool to select the part of the sunrise I wanted to used for the collage. I then opened refine edge, and began to clean up the edges to make it look nicer. I also feathered the picture out so it looked more natural. I then copy and pasted it onto my blank background. To move the sunrise into the place that I wanted and in the size that I wanted I selected Free Transform. When resizing the picture, I held down the shift key to help keep the proportions in tact. I used the same steps with the other photos. When I worked on the brick wall I did not use the same place on the wall because all the bricks are different even when they look the same. After I pasted them on to the background I needed to adjust the tone of the bricks because they looked faded and I wanted to make them stand out. The sand Picture was the harder on to do because I had to make many copies to fill in the white spaces.
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Reflection
During this project there were many difficult moments. I had to figure out a way around them to finish my final product, and i am proud of my final out come. Photoshop was not an easy tool to work with. I struggles a lot figuring out the tools and how to manipulate them. I spent many hours trying to make things work. Other people around me made it look simple and easy to use. Once I had figured out the tools it all seemed to work. Andy Warhol used repletion in his paintings and I was trying to imitate that in my digital collage. I struggled with selecting the best part of the sun rise to use. The feathering tool was difficult as well finding the right balance for each picture that was used. Once I figured out how I wanted everything to work and i knew how to use tools it was very simple to put the final product together. I had some troubles with Photoshop not saving my work like I told it to. I lost my work multiple times because Photoshop shut down during the saving process. In the end I an proud of my final product and the new knowledge that I have gained using Photoshop to create my digital collage.
ACT Connection
- “A New Day” is similar to the inspiration through the imitation of the repetition of the pictures used which is found in Andy Warhol's pictures.
- My inspiration, inspired me to create a digital collage that is very subjective. “A New Day”can represent different things to many different people. To truly understand what it represents for me people need to read my paper that goes along with it.
- When researching my inspiration I came to the conclusion that a lot of Warhol’s painting were very subjective. He had his reasons for creating the piece but you could see it as u wanted to see it.
- The central idea around my inspiration research was finding a way to show that there will always be a tomorrow, a new day.
- The inferences that were made when reading my research was, that Andy Warhol was trying to make a statement to the public through his paintings. He made the statements in the use repetition in his work. Which was similar to the way that factories would use repetition to mass produce goods.