Digital Collage
Exhibition TextMy piece, Development, is a digital collage created on a photo editing program called GIMP. All of the images in this piece are of me and I manipulated each one using GIMP. I was inspired by the characteristics of German Expressionism including the use of negative space and warped colors and textures. More specifically, I was inspired by Portrait of Gerda by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Saint Francis by Karl Schmidt-Rottluff.
EssaySports have been a huge part of my life. I started playing at a very young age. I was about four when I began to play baseball and I’ve continued to play to this day. It is by far my favorite sport to play. I was about seven when I began to play soccer, and I was around ten when I began to play basketball. Playing these sports has given me the opportunity to play on many different teams and it has shaped the person I am today.
One specific memory I have of baseball was when I was about 11. I had a very frustrating experience playing that year due to the team I was a part of. My team got new coaches and I did not agree with the way they organized and ran the team. Though I had a rough year of baseball, I never gave up. I finished the year strong and continued to play just as hard if not harder. This helped me to be more determined and I've never quit anything since. This is just one of many different lessons I learned from sports. I have learned a lot from playing sports. Another lesson I learned from playing baseball is the fact that you are never perfect and that there is and always will be room for improvement. I realized this as I got older. This was because I noticed that some of the kids that were extremely skilled when I was little ended up falling behind everyone else due to their lack of trying to improve. This lesson doesn’t only go for sports. It goes for everything in life whether it be in school or something else. You always have to improve yourself and strive to be the best you can be. Another big thing I learned is that the only way to get better at something is by practicing. Sports showed me that in order to be better, I have to work harder and embrace challenges when I come across them. When I first began soccer I didn’t know much about it, but I didn’t let that stop me. I just practiced and played till I got better and I continue to work even harder now. Being on a team means that everyone has to do their job to be successful but more importantly everyone has to have each others backs. This includes supporting teammates and encouraging them to do their best in a positive way. When you are on a team it is your responsibility to both do your best, but also to have good sportsmanship. Good sportsmanship means that I am respectful to my teammates, opponents, and everyone involved. This also reflects in my life outside of sports. I am respectful and polite to just about everyone. By practicing good sportsmanship all the time I have become a very kind person. Playing sports has shaped and molded who I am today. After high school I’m not sure if I will continue to play sports, but I do know that I will always think about the things sports have taught me. I will continue to be influenced by the things I have received from my experiences even after I am done playing sports. PlanningI created two different layouts or designs to start out with. The first was inspired by Surrealism while the second was inspired by German Expressionism. I decided to base my collage on my second idea. Then I had to come up with how I wanted to depict what I had laid out and a big part of that was the background. I developed two feasible ideas for the design of it. The first design I had developed was to contrast touching colors with a blur tool. I had experimented with this tool when I was learning how to use GIMP. I had observed that it was possible to create an appealing pattern while keeping the colors contrasted or without blending the two colors. The second plan for the background was to recolor parts of the background by selecting free-form, organic shapes and distorting the colors.
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Development
61 cm x 91.5 cm Digital Collage September 2016 Inspiration:Schmidt-Rottluff, Karl. Saint Francis. 1919 moma.org September 10 2016
Kirchner, Ernst. Portrait of Gerda 1914. Van der Heydt Museum, Wuppertal, Germany. wikiart.com September 10 2016. My piece is inspired by the style of German Expressionism. This type of art was important in culture from about 1905 till around 1935. German Expressionism was inspired by Van Gogh's expressionist paintings. Another inspiration of this art culture was Edvard Munch. The German Expressionist style includes distorted colors, misshapen scale, and malformed space in order to convey their subjective feelings on what was observed from their perspective. German Expressionist artists often created pieces portraying dramatic and compelling scenes and people. There are two parts to German Expressionism. The first is Die Brucke. Artists of Die Brucke created a modern style with fauvist coloring that often expressed radical social views in paintings. One medium used in Die Brucke was the woodcut. In these pieces of art, the use of space is very important. The negative space was what made the image and the overall composition of the artwork. The second part was Der Blaue Reiter which expressed spiritual belief and values using a primary component of color. My digital collage was inspired by two pieces of art from the German Expressionist movement. Both also originate from Die Brucke. The first was a painting by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner called Portrait of Gerda. I incorporated the use of color from Kirchner’s painting in the background of my collage by colliding the colors together in order to give it an appealing contrast. German Expressionists I was also inspired by Karl Schmidt-Rottluff’s Saint Francis and woodcuts in general. In my collage the central figure is depicted through negative space much like that of woodcuts. |
Process
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For this project I used a photo editing software called GIMP. After finding the photos I wanted to use I uploaded them to GIMP. I started by cropping what part of the background photos that I needed. I then was able to move it onto my previously created work space in the position I wanted them and began to “colorize” them. I started by colorizing the entire photograph and then selecting what I wanted to be a different color by using the lasso tool. This allowed me to single out what I wanted to be a different color precisely. I made sure no two similar hues were touching which would be important later. Once I completed the colorization, I moved onto the blurring or smudging. In order to do this I put all the layers of my collage into one single layer. This gave me the ability to smudge the background colors in order to give them a sense of collision. What this also did was make the main focus of the photos to pop out and make the mid-ground contrast more from the background. I had originally planned on morphing the colors of the background more, but I decided to scrap that Idea because I thought it looked great as is. Once my mid-ground and background were complete, I was able to start on my foreground. For this I had to once again select the part of the image I wanted to be seen and delete the rest of the image. Once complete, I copied and pasted my foreground picture onto my work space. In order to make this stand out and add to the overall appeal to the piece, I made the image white in order to imitate negative space. |
Critique |
Reflection |
My piece had a much different process of creation due to the different mediums. My inspiration came from a painting, Portrait of Gerda by Kirchner, and a wood cut, Saint Francis by Schmidt-Rottluff. My piece was created using modern technology whilst incorporating these pieces' style. My use of color in the background was inspired by Portrait of Gerda. Kirchner's piece includes organic shapes with contrasting colors. I attempted to collide the colors to give the same effect, but I didn't use the organic forms as he did. As for Saint Francis, I really just liked the idea of using negative space to create an image. I couldn't have the same style and use of negative space as Kirchner due to my medium.
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Overall, I think this piece went very well. The final result differs quite a bit from my original plan, but it differs for the better. I, for the most part, didn't change the basic layout of my picture, but I changed hues on the spot by experimenting with it and choosing what I thought fit best. It was challenging to decide what to do because there are so many tools that allow you to do so much in Photoshop/GIMP. The possibilities are endless. One challenge I did have using GIMP was learning all of the tools. In class we learned how to use Adobe Photoshop which was similar but still different from GIMP. After some practice I was able to get much better and comfortable using GIMP.
ACT connection1. The use of color and space in my inspirations are reflected in my piece. The use of vibrant or contrasting colors is reflected in the background of the image and the form in the center is created with the use of negative space much like in German Expressionist woodcuts.
2. My inspirations create art in order to portray their own subjective feelings. This is the reason that German Expressionist paintings and woodcuts are not created with realistic hues, forms, and space. 3. Throughout time peoples ideas and feeling change and German Expressionists attempted to capture their own feelings of their generation. 4. The central Idea of my research was expression and communication of feelings. 5. People can express the same idea in many different ways. This also goes the other way. People can express very different ideas while using the same style of art. |
Schmidt-Rottluff, Karl. Saint Francis. 1919 moma.org September 10 2016
Kirchner, Ernst. Portrait of Gerda 1914. Van der Heydt Museum, Wuppertal, Germany. wikiart.com September 10 2016.
"Expressionism." Visual-Arts-Cork.com. N.p., n.d. Web. 10 Sept. 2016.
Kirchner, Ernst. Portrait of Gerda 1914. Van der Heydt Museum, Wuppertal, Germany. wikiart.com September 10 2016.
"Expressionism." Visual-Arts-Cork.com. N.p., n.d. Web. 10 Sept. 2016.