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MY CREATIVE PROCESS
I N S P I R A T I O N
I was inspired to embark on this project because so many people are still reeling from the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and political turmoil in the United States, even now in Spring 2021. This project was a way for me to reflect on these "once in a lifetime" events as well as record them for future generations of people who did not live through them but want to know what these experiences were actually like.
T I M E & A T T E N T I O N M A N A G E M E N T
Because this project involved twelve pieces of art, it was imperative that I planned ahead and stayed on top of my schedule to complete the collages over the semester so that I was not left with too much work to complete at the last minute. I found that the best way to do this was to plan each week to devote approximately 2 hours every Sunday afternoon on completing at least one collage, beginning the first week of the semester. As the semester went on and my workload accumulated, there were some weeks where my capstone project got pushed to the back burner but I was able to get back on track the next week by putting a little bit of extra time in.
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When I was working on my capstone collages, I found that I was most productive when I minimized my distractions (like my phone, TV, other people) and focused strictly on making art. This enabled me to really get into the "flow" of creativity and come up with more coherent design ideas.
T E C H N I Q U E S
COLLAGE
I have been doing collage since I was little, but I did not start taking it more seriously until high school. Up until this point, I have always done collage by hand -- cutting out images from magazines, newspapers, et cetera and pasting them to paper or other materials. To step a little bit out of my comfort zone, I decided to use this capstone project as an opportunity to learn something completely new by teaching myself how to make digital collages using Adobe Photoshop. There was definitely a learning curve but after watching a few YouTube tutorials, it felt fairly intuitive. With each of the twelve collages I made for this project, it seemed like I got a little bit better at it.
I T E R A T I V E D E S I G N
The collage medium is a little bit unique in that you can't exactly plan your artwork out in too much detail ahead of time because it all depends on what images you encounter when sourcing. You can't always predict what will be available in a magazine or wherever you are looking online. Because I opted to do digital collages, I was able to arrange and subsequently rearrange the elements of my collage as many times as I wanted to, right up until the last minute when I had to export the file. As a result, I went through many, many, many iterations of each design and I think this was beneficial to my final product because it allowed me to continue to tweak elements and improve the overall quality of work.
P R O J E C T E V O L U T I O N
This capstone project evolved in a number of ways throughout the past year. When I first proposed my topic, I planned to make each one of the twelve collages entirely by hand, but I decided over winter break that I wanted to learn how to make collages digitally on my computer. The collage shown here to the left was one of my early experiments. This was also really practical for me because it meant that I did not have to maintain a large workspace and keep track of all of my collage clippings.
Initially, I also planned to combine my collages in a zine that could be downloaded as a printable PDF, but I ultimately decided that I could create an interesting and immersive experience through the Wix web design itself.