Exercise 2.6

Cut up’s

Take a newspaper, one that corresponds to your style pictures use The mirror or Metro, typography and words use The Times or Guardian.

Use a pair of scissors or craft knife start to cut the newspaper sheets in various ways, horizontally and vertically, and four quarters.

Continue until you have different sized squares.

Place them together, or in columns or strips, above or below each other. Cut two people and create a new person, show dark and light colours together, can you create a landscape or new story?

Keep experimenting and have 5 collages done.

So I started this exercise by going to the supermarket to buy a newspaper, I wanted one that had a lot of images rather than text, but as I went after work there wasn’t that many to choose from, so I ended up with The Daily Mail.

I started by cutting one sheet diagonally in half, then another vertically down, then cut another bit into four halves, this is how the collage went in my sketchbook:-

Diagonally cut

collage 1 finished

I then went on to cut out two sheets and use all the images only to create this collage, as you can see it was a page from the back (the sports section) and a page from the celebrity section, I tried to combine both elements together to create a new collage and picture, and having the two colours red and blue helped to unite the pieces. I used one of the footballers body’s with the celebrity woman’s head to create a new person.

Filling that collage I then felt I had more of a creative output, so wanted to further this more. I started by cutting out all the images over three pages this time, to give more variety in the collage. I went for a group of people theme, with a Covid background story to it, it shows the different groups of people all self isolating yet coming together for the NHS. I added some food just for colour and a background theme. I added three character’s this time which I switched there body’s and heads.

Moving on from that theme, I wanted to try and make a simpler collage but with people in it still. So this design was using up the odd bits that were left over from the last collages and patching them together to create a story. So this story is of a couple with a toddler and cat moving into there new home, I used all the plainer pieces for the background and scenery, using green colours and neutrals for this.

From this I liked using all the textures from the plainer collage pieces so thought how could I create a collage like that, I looked through the rest of the paper and found a fashion page, which showed lots of outfits which luckily had lots of different textures to them.

I chose to do a fashion collage with a model in the centre then build up the piece by using the texture shapes to create a background.

I also like the colour theme here as well, the pinks and mint greens with the neutrals, then the model in yellow really makes her pop out.

Reflection

What went well?

I enjoyed the creativity of the exercise and I liked using my imagination to come up with scenarios for the collage themes.

I think the progress from the first collage to the 3rd collage really helped me to think about how to create stories for the pictures.

I enjoyed looking for the textures in the images for final picture and this could work further into smaller collage pieces more like a mosaic.

What would you do different next time?

I wasn’t sure in which direction this exercise wanted us to go in, so I am not sure if this is the output you wanted but I found that as I went through the five pictures that I thought more about what I wanted to create and used my imagination more to get the desired affect.

I think as an exercise I what as interesting one, where you can use existing images to create new ones, and how your imagination and stories can flow from that.