Photo Editing

Collages

Client

Design Project

YEar

2022

Tools

Adobe Creative Suite

The Challenge

2 collages, 20 pictures.

For this project we had the opportunity to create two collages only bound by our imagination. One had to be created solely with photos that we took on our own and the other could be created using photos from internet sources.

My Role(s)

Photographer

All the photos for the personal collage were shot by me around my home in Elon, NC. The second Elon collage was comprised of images sourced from Unsplash.

Photo Editor

I collaged images together to convey that creativity has no boundaries and also squirrels. They run the campus at Elon. It's their home we just exist around them.

Design 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, my favorite pizza place, and compiled the images to create a similar effect to the video below. Here are also some of the collages that initially inspired me and that I looked at frequently to figure out the placement of images and color theory.

Design Inspiration

Images for personal Collage

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.

Images for Elon Collage

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.

In the spring 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. 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: