Courtesy of my school campus, a good friend, and the local art museum.

[[Critique]]

Once again, I was pretty crunched for time on this project. I tend to let myself procrastinate with thinking of ideas and not actually taking action to develop those ideas. So, if I had the chance, what I would change about my montage is my time management. I’m absolutely positive I could have ended up with a nicer result if I had given myself the time and chance to go out and take more photos and play around with it a bit more. One thing that resulted from my not having time was that I originally wanted the background to be clouds, not a tree. It would have been more surreal if it looked like the building she is in were in the sky. But, unfortunately, living in an almost permanently sunny city, days with clouds are rare. So in the few days that I had to take pictures, every day was annoyingly cloudless. And hot. Another thing I would change is maybe putting other people or things in the other two frames, to put more balance in the photo.

Something that I like about my project is the way I had her arms through the two walls. I think it looks pretty realistic, but not perfect or anything. I also like the frames. [I'm not really sure what to call them]. Or I guess you could say the walls/columns. If I had decided to go with putting two more objects in the other two, or a theme that involved three of something, it would have turned out really cool. I also like that I added a different background to the window , I think it makes the picture seem just a little bit off.

The inspiration I drew from for the project was Jerry Uelsmann. His art is amazing.

I liked how he combined man-made things with natural things, but my idea didn’t really incorporate his. What I did use was his use of black and white photos. I think that using black and white for these kinds of photos adds an edge of darkness to the fantasy, which I prefer over the color; to me, that creates a sort of child-like fantasy.

[[Critique]] The very first thing I would change about my collage is how I budgeted my time. I waited until the last minute to start creating it, and I’m not too happy about what I finished with. I feel it looks unfinished. So, if I were to re-do this project, I would work on it more [to make it look completed], and I think I would also like to have a more cohesive theme. My collage just kind of showed natural things vs. man-made things, but I also wanted to show what happens when they collide, er, affect each other.

What I like about my collage is how I used layer masks to make my ”finished” collage look almost seamless. I’m most proud of how I made the sun look like it’s inside the grate, because the took me a lot of hard work, and took a long time. I also like how I created a shadow for the green plant. I’m not really sure what it has to do with my idea or anything, but I like how it looks.

What I liked the least would probably the color combinations. I wanted everything to be floursecent, but I generally don’t like flourescent colors. So I don’t know if it’s just me not liking the colors, or if they really are that unattractive. I hope not. But uh, I think the green plant is kind of off-putting compared to the bright pinks and yellow, but then again I kind of like it because it pops out. I also think I could have done something more clever with my layout. I mean, I did put thought into it, but I was in a little bit of a hurry. And because of having to do a lot of layer masks, as I added more stuff to my collage I couldn’t really move anything that I had worked on previously.

                                                    Here’s the Rauschenberg collage I used as my inspiration;

created by Robert Rauschenberg

I chose this piece of art because I liked the colors, and how they were all somewhat transparent and overlapping. I couldn’t really decide what to derive from his collage, so everything I drew from this was aesthetic. I chose to use bright colors like he did, and I also used transparent, overlapping images. I got my idea to put the sun in the grate because of how Rauschenberg made the cat look like it was sitting on the stairs.