project2

Overall, I disliked the collage project because it’s simply something that I don’t think enough about. I don’t have the “abstract” mind that I feel is required for a successful collage. Thus, I went with what I knew, and that was a digital collage that had the feel of being its own image (something “magazine worthy” instead of “fine art worthy”, as was said during the critique).

I admired how abstract or well planned other collages looked, and it made me curious as to what their thought processes were for creating it. Instead of “thinking outside the box”, I confined myself to what I knew, and I think that was reflected in my collages. For me, I played it safe because I grew stubborn with physically cutting apart images that I was tired of anyway.

After hearing the critiques, I don’t think I really would have done anything differently. I don’t feel as though I would have been satisfied with any of the physical collages that I might have tried to do, so I still would have gone the digital route.

Below are the screen captures for importing my photos into Lightroom as Joe showed us to do. I have a screen capture of importing the photos I had thought of using for the final collages. There is also a screen capture of my imported scans, but none of them were actually used in the final collages; the scans were taken before I had settled on my collage “theme”.

©2015, Loren Gamez
Harmony 5 of 5
Digital collage, 8″ x 10″

Last of the five final collages that I created for this project, and this one played around with the idea of being on the inside of one of the portals. However, it can also be seen as though objects from the portal (in this instance, a window) are extending their reach across both destinations. One might look at the collage and see a bird that has flown into the portal and this is where it ended up, or this may look like the end of a journey back from the mysterious portal destination. I also liked matching the blurriness of the plant on the left to the original blurriness of the larger brick wall to give it a more seamless feel, as though the plant was there originally, even though it wasn’t.

Project 2 Screen Captures
Collage 1

©2015, Loren Gamez
Harmony 4 of 5
Digital collage, 10″ x 8″

Fourth of my five collages, this was actually the first collage that I began working on when I was playing around with my idea of “portals”. In this one, I like how the various sizes of the bricks creates a movement as if the portal had just opened and the bricks are falling inside. This collage was fun because I actually created the bricks out of various paving stones that I had cut out from the original image, and transformed them to make 3 sides of each brick visible instead of the top.

Collage 5

©2015, Loren Gamez
Harmony 3 of 5
Digital collage, 10″ x 8″

This was the third out of my digital collages that I was considering to use as the final collages. This collage, rather than a “portal” that leads to a different area, this collage acts as a more literal barrier between one setting and the next and creates a sense of transparency in a brick wall that we normally perceive as always being solid.

Collage 4

©2015, Loren Gamez
Harmony 2 of 5
Digital collage, 8″ x 10″

My second collage, and one of the two final collages that I used for my critique, this image also focuses on a portal, but has a different destination. In this collage, a sewer entry that one might pass by and ignore every day was turned into a “doorway” that might lead to a home.

Collage 3

©2015, Loren Gamez
Harmony 1 of 5
Digital collage, 10″ x 8″

This is my first collage, and one of the two final collages that I used for my critique. For my collages, I was interested in the idea of “portals”; a hidden place that could be hidden in plain sight in a mundane location like as a busy street such as South Congress. In this particular collage, the pavements on a walkway are the hidden site of a portal that leads to another part of the city.

Collage 2
Project 2 Screen Captures