Artwork by Gigi Bashaw. Balloon image: Siora Photography on Unsplash.
My digital college began as an experiment but slowly became a way for me to revisit and reimagine a childhood experience through a fantastical landscape. I chose to use Photoshop for this assignment because I had experience with it in high school and hoped I’d be able to adapt quickly. Luckily, my mom had an Adobe account I could use, but I still needed to look up a beginner digital collage tutorial before I tried making anything of my own (here’s the one I used: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8QuSjhmvV8&t=67s). After learning the basics, I gathered over 100 landscape photos from my Photos app, all taken over the years. I uploaded many of them to Photoshop and experimented with different layers to see which images interacted well visually.
As per the advice in the YouTube tutorial I watched, I gathered more photos from my phone, selected and masked them all, and moved them around to see what I liked. Ultimately, I stuck with a photograph of three people, my stepdad, stepbrother, and me, when I was five, running into the distance, which became the heart of the collage. I was still unsure what else to place in the foreground, so I went through a few iterations. One of them you can see here:
I ended up searching for an image of a blue balloon on Unsplash because in the original photograph from my childhood, my mom, who took the photos that day, was holding a blue balloon that kept making it into the frame. I drew the ribbon on the balloons using a brush tool and then saved my work. Unfortunately, after saving, I realized I didn’t like the placement of all the balloons, but I can't change them because I saved incorrectly. Although I don’t hate the outcome of my work, I felt frustrated at my mistake and often wished I were creating with physical materials. Despite this, I acknowledge the uniqueness of digital collage, which allows the artist to use images without compromising their quality during printing.
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