Lens BasedTitle: Untitled
Medium: Digital Completion: November 25, 2023 Exhibition TextThis project was all about understanding the functions of digital applications. I was new to anything digital art related so this project was harder than I thought it would be. Overall, I got the hang of the digital tools and ended up making a non serious collage from a collection of old and new photos.
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Process
These images are the ten I am using to build a collage. There are 5 landscapes which are shown in the first row and 5 of people shown in the second row. These images were picked at random by looking through my camera roll.
In order to create this collage I used an online application called PhotoPea. This site allows me to do manipulate photos in many different ways so that I can build one image with aspects of the ten photos above. For the first step, I took the image of me as a kid and clicked on the "select" tab on the top of the screen and then clicked on "redefined edge". This allowed me to drag my cursor over the image I want to select and then cut out whatever is left behind. I could also change the size of the tool to get the details around the smaller parts of the image but then increase the sizing to fill in the inside.
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I then started selecting another photo I had where but this time I used the magnet lasso selector which identifies the edges of the object that is being selected. This tool was harder to work with since it would often recognize shadows and objects from the background as part of the main image and then I would have to go back and erase the lines. I would do this by clicking on the negative button on the top left of the screen. I had to be careful when using this since if you click certain parts of the image then it erases a whole section. When this would happen I would have to then click on the addition button and try and add the part of the image that was deleted from the selection. I definitely preferred the redefined edge tool over the magnet lasso since there were fewer complications with selecting the image.
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Then I added both of my cropped images onto the same transparent background by going to the edit tab and clicking copy for both selections. Then I went on to the original project background and hit paste. I had a hard time moving the images and changing the sizing but I realized that it was because the moving function was in locked mode meaning that it was disabled. Once I enabled it, I clicked on the edit tab and then clicked I moved the
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I wanted to start combining all of the images that I had cropped so far but I did not want to keep the transparent background so I decided on the sunset photo for the background. I then used the rectangle select tool on the left side of the screen to select the photos then hit edit and copy them. Once I copied each individual photo, I started pasting them on top of the sunset photo. I did not have a problem with the overlapping of the images except with the child photo of the girl posing. I could not figure out why it was not appearing on the image but it was showing up in the layers. I fixed this by copying the image then deleting the image and re-pasting it on to the image. This worked but it made the image in black and white so I had to go to the color settings and adjust the hues. I then organized the cropped photos to where I thought they would look best. I had to put some in the corner since the original photos were cropped.
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I then just kept selecting certain parts of the photos that I wanted to add and then copying and pasting over the collaged image. For the palm trees, I did not love how the blue from the sky in the original photo was peaking through since it did not blend in with the sunset photo. I could not do much about this since I the leaves on the palm tree were so detailed and small. I tried to get as close to the leaves as possible but it was so difficult to get all of the background out. I then placed the hut and the palm trees along the right side of the image where I thought they looked best.
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I repeated the redefined edge tool once again with another sunset. My idea for this photo was to collage it over the sun part of the other sunset that I placed as my background. I wanted to make this look coherent with the rest of the sky but my vision did not turn out how I wanted. I tried messing with the layer options but no matter how I tried to crop it over the image it still did not look blended in. I decided to just have as a normal layer with a hard edge around the orange selection.
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I added the handstand photo but I had no idea where to put it. At this point my collage was getting pretty crowded so I did not have many options for where to place selections. I also added the forest trees from another photo but the only open space I had for them was in the sky so I made them upside down too so that it had better composition. I had problems with overlapping the palm trees and hut to go behind the girl eating a chicken leg so I placed them along the horizon.
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Experimentation
I was experimenting with the layer work. I noticed the little tab under the layers tab on the right side of the screen and was curious about each function did. I started messing with each one and then I found the overlay option. I really liked this but I still wanted to keep the original image as well so I copied the image when it was in the normal layer option then only overlayed one of the copies to make it look fading away.
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I repeated the process of cropping out the background with the redefine edge tool for each photo because I found it was the easiest and fastest way to edit. I do not have a steady hand which is the one thing that made selecting it pretty hard but I was able to capture detail when I zoomed in and made the selecting cursor smaller.
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Since I had to find space for the forest selection I wanted to make it upside down. In order to do this I clicked the edit tab on the top left screen and then went to transform. From there, there are a ton of options for what tools can be applied. I chose to rotate it 180 degrees to make it completely upside down. Before I did this, I looked at the other rotation options to see if any of them looked better but I liked the way this one looked the best.
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Reflection
I think the biggest thing that made this project so difficult was how I was starting it with no skills on digital art making. I have never once used Photopea or a site similar to it so I was learning every single function on my own. I started to get the hang of after a while. Another challenge was the application itself. Every time I would start getting a ton of process done on the collage, the site would disconnect with the network or crash completely. When this would happen it would either not save anything or only save certain parts of the project. This made it really frustrating since I would have to redo all of the functions I already did. I did like this project for its silliness though. I thought of this project more as a learning experience so I was less concerned with how the final product looked. The hardest parts for me was the selection parts of the project. But it was really nice when I had all of that done with and I was just able to place the objects where I wanted. Overall, I think this project helped me learn a lot about digital programs but I still do have more to learn since there were some confusing aspects to this project.