Digital Imaging & Meaning, Set 1. Digital Collages.

Digital Collage #1

The Great Cover-Up

10"x15"

This piece began while I was searching through magazines looking for things to scan for the assignment. I kept coming across make-up ads that really frustrated me so I started tearing them out. Most of the major images in the piece are scanned images but a few things definitely came from the Internet. I wanted the cutout pieces to look very choppy like I had physically cut them out and pasted them together on paper. I put bags under the eyes of this pastiche style face and put crows feet on her too. I wanted to emphasize the features the way the magazine ads emphasize the need to hide or get rid of them. I put paintbrush marks over some of the words to look like make-up as well. The whole piece is a statement on how the media really loves to tell women that they need to do certain things so they can be attractive to society regardless of how beautiful they are. They hold every woman up to this standard of beauty that the models wouldn't even achieve without photoshop. I probably could have improved the piece by making multiple versions that varied a lot. The other versions I made just had small differences and just made it look a little awkward.

Digital Collage #2

 Sweet Tooth

14"x9.5"

For this piece I used a lot of pictures from the Internet along with downloaded brushes and some text I made all of these different pictures into a mouth. The word SWEET has parts erased to look like its rotting away as your teeth would if you ate sugar all the time. The rows of teeth are made of 4 or 5 individual molar images that I cut and pasted together, then warped to give a curved look like they're actually in a mouth. I had to mess with the hues of everything to make it all look like candy. I wanted it to be made up almost entirely of bright childlike colors. I think I could have spent more time on the gums to help them blend into the teeth like gums actually do. I think the lips might also be a little too much but I haven't decided the best way to fix all of that quite yet.