Collage -- "Absolution"

I've been making collages off and on for the last few years.  Worked on a new one today.  In the past, I've worked just with physical images, clippings from magazines, with no scans or Photoshop work.  I changed methods on this.  Assembling the separate images into a layout much larger than regular 8.5x11 paper, then scanning individual images, and reassembling the collage digitally into a large Photoshop file.

To give a sense of scale, both the astronaut and library photos are full page magazine ads, taken from Wired.  It was fun to have both more flexibility and control with scale and layout.  All my past collages have been rectangular, whereas this is designed to change that.  Next time, I might try to "box" the layout in white, put a small white perimeter border, and set it against a background color.

As with previous attempts, I've been interested in the value of juxtaposition, assembling disparate images to create a new overall mood.  In this piece, I particularly like the Mark Trail "Well, well" panel, the cheerleaders' "flying V's, and the astronaut/cloud pairing.  The cheerleader image, taken from the local paper, was visually very dominating.  It was fun to work against that, try to quite the repetition of the image to integrate it with the line volume of the other pieces.

Very relaxing, fun to make all these small scale aesthetic decisions.

Click here for a high resolution view.  :)