Week 5 Collage

Sweetwater http://www.asahi-net.or.jp
Japanese artist Natsuki Kimura, makes a living as a designer and influences are Mark Rothko, Richard Brautigan, Toshinobu Onosato, Warren Zevon. He takes considerable attention to the positioning, space and symmetry of image. Very controlled and simplistic approach.
Collage is an intriguing concept, last year in the Painting and Drawing class we were asked to collage images cut out from magazines. My lecturer told me to freely place images and not let the mind control the positioning. Where as now, we are digitally collaging images and alot of thought is at play with colour, space, line, effects and positioning. I feel like i am caught between the two.

Today i brought in 120 photos i have taken from the Arthouse. I initially selected two images to merge into each other as the background. One of inside the Arthouse and another from the beer garden. I first masked the layer then used the gradient icon to fade the images into each other. I then took a old pool table light from another room at the Arthouse and used the magic wand to outline the designated area. I then masked the layer and painted in black over the areas i wanted to get rid of and to clean up the image borders. I transformed the image (command T) and held shift to hold its shape and selected colour dodge as the effect. As jack the dog is (so called) the owner and security, i magic wand the area around him and transformed his size. The next image was of a band playing and the light manipulated, so once again i used the magic wand to select the image and transformed the size. Another image of a friend playing i imported next to the background layers, i changed the size, masked it and used the gradient effect. The last image i used on the Arthouse symbol and played in on top of the cigarette machine poster and used linear light as the effect. I noticed too much transparency so made the pool table light effect back to normal.
This collage i made today was quite busy and chaotic. I worked their last saturday night on a sold out show, maybe the chaos of that night is still in my mind and subconsciencly portrayed. Today was the first time i have used Photoshop so with the limited tools i used, i believe i have a long way to go, i will look at the online tutorial for Photoshop tomorrow.