Photo collage

I was inspired by Nora Kovat to use an actual reference to inspire my enamelling colour choices. I want to choose colour schemes that exist in nature. I am going to do some watercolour drawings but for the meantime, I created some digital photo collages. I used photos I have taken of my garden and other places; I want to print my collages and place them at my bench to influence my work. My original plan was to do some collages from magazines and some drawings. Due to the lockdown, I couldn't collect any from friends and family as I don't have any magazines at home.

I downloaded the photos and uploaded them into an app called Artflow. Each image had its own layer and I moved layer by layer erasing the backgrounds of each picture. This was time-consuming and somewhat frustrating to try not accidentally erase the edges of the image. I then played with placement and layering the images to see which image needed to overlap other images. Once the individual images were layered exactly to my liking I merged them into one image. When I was about to save the first collage I accidentally made the collage a negative which changed all the colours their opposite colour also making it neon. The changes made the collage interesting especially the second collage it made the plants look like deep-sea neon coral. I saved both collages as normal images and as negatives.

First collage

First collage negative

Second collage

Second collage negative