Digital Photography & Imaging - Project 1
Week 2 - Week 3 / 07.04.2021 - 14.04.2021
Project 1A - Physical Collage
Exercise - Pre-compositions of Physical Collage
During the tutorial session, we were instructed to choose and identify the design elements of our collage and start pre-composing the elements into a composition. Next, we should take three photos of the pre-compositions of the collage and submit them via Google Classroom. This exercise was conducted to help us practise with composition.
Compiling some potential cutouts and materials retrieved from the internet and the old magazines beforehand was a good start for this exercise as it helps me to form some basic ideas for the pre-compositions. Not to mention that looking up on Pinterest for collage inspirations and references is also extremely helpful when I was running out of ideas.
Composing the cutouts of design elements into a collage was a fun yet challenging experience to me. The fun part of it was that the possibilities of the arrangement and design elements are basically infinite and it was fun exploring and combining different elements together to create a unique collage. Paper bags, notebook pages, magazines, different textured and colour papers were some interesting elements that could be applied. However, the challenge of it was estimating the scale of the cutouts. For example, there were some cutouts from magazines that really sparked my interest and I wanted to include them in my composition, but the problem was that some elements were either too big or small which ended up not looking good in the composition.
After many trials, I have finally come up with three pre-compositions:
Pre-composition 1
Pre-composition 2
Pre-composition 3
Final Design
In Week 3, Mr. Martin gave his feedback on the 3 pre-compositions and suggested me to submit Pre-composition 3 as the final design. The figure below is the final design.
Elements like the island, the sea and butterfly represent the man’s interest in nature. Blue, green, brown and white are the main colours used to create a sense of nature to the design. A large cutout of the man's head is placed at the foreground to seize viewers’ attention. The words “film”, “passion” and “vision”, as well as the cut out of him holding a camera are to show the man’s passion for films and photography.
Week 3 / 14.04.2021
Project 1B - Digital Collage
For this part of Project 1, we were required to compose three designs of digital collages using Adobe Photoshop.
I knew I have the tendency to add too many elements to a design which would make it too busy and lose focus, thus I tried to limit myself into using only 3 - 4 images/elements while composing the digital collages. I was aiming to achieve clean and well-organised compositions.
Below are my three compositions for the digital collage:
Composition 1
Among the variety of images, the betta fish stood out to me the most. Hence, I decided to incorporate it as the main subject. Adhering to the Rule of Thirds, the fish was enlarged and placed at the top left of the canvas to serve as the focal point. The two buildings were positioned in a way that their angles were pointing toward the fish, causing the edges of the buildings to work as the leading lines that guide the viewers’ eyes to the main subject of the design. Multiple layers of the fish with different blending modes were stacked together to give more dimension to the betta fish. A textured layer was added as the background to create a grainy and grungy effect to the design.
Now looking back at this finalised composition, I can give it a possible narrative. With the grunge effect, the two buildings resemble abandoned buildings and especially an abandoned hospital. The unusually large betta fish is the mythical creature that inhabits the abandoned hospital in the forest. The fish is capable of living outside of the waters as it has the power to create a water sphere that embraces it, allowing it to breathe within it.
Composition 2
Figure 2.1 Composition 2
I seemed to like the betta fishes more than expected, thus they are once again used as the main subject of the second composition. The blue betta fish was enlarged (until it was covering most of the canvas) and placed at the middle ground in order to showcase its elegant and grateful tails and fins. The smaller red fish was edited to look like it was swimming through the retro TV. The colours of both fish are adjusted so that they stood out from each other. Two pieces of Korean text can be seen in the top right corner and the bottom left corner of the canvas. The text was extracted from the lyrics of a K-pop song called “Singing in the Rain” by Jinsoul. Fish was an element that occurs throughout its music video, thus I was reminded of the song as I was playing around with the arrangements of the betta fish. Additionally, the music video makes use of colours such as blue, magenta and red, thus the fish were recoloured accordingly to the aesthetics of the music video.
Composition 3
Step-by-step progression:
Inspired by the second composition, two fish reminded me of the zodiac symbol of the horoscope, Pisces. Therefore, I wanted to design a collage with the theme Pisces. Two betta fish were placed at the center, making it the main focus of the composition. A pale yellow circle and a block of orange texture was layered behind the fish, allowing the bright blue fish to stand out. I wanted to highlight the Pisces traits of being imaginative and empathetic as these are the traits that I can find from my Pisces friends as well. Therefore, the texts were aligned at the top right corner and the bottom left corner of the canvas.
Review and Adjustments
After reviewing all three compositions with Mr. Martin, he agreed that Composition 1 (Figure 2.) and Composition 2 (Figure 2.1) fit the topic of digital design better and he suggested that I could choose to work on either one of these two compositions and submit it as the final design. For Composition 2, he suggested to reposition the two betta fish: the bigger fish could be placed at the left of the composition whereas the smaller fish could be aligned at the right angle.
Personally I prefer Composition 2 over Composition 1, thus I decided to work on Composition 2 and submit the outcome as the final design. Taking Mr. Martin's comments into consideration, I made several versions of the same composition, each with slight variations in terms of the placement of the elements:
Final Design
After receiving much opinions from others and my personal consideration, I chose #4 as the final design for this project.
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