Homework 3.1. Summer Dreams. Digital Collage.

Stephanie Oniffrey, Summer Dreams, 2018. Digital collage combining photography, acrylic painting, and digital drawing. 

When I created this collage, I chose to draw upon warm summer memories to inform my landscape, in an effort to imbue the scene with a hazy nostalgia that is both personal and relatable. Though this scene, with combined elements of painting, photography, and digital drawing, exists nowhere on earth, but is at the same time somehow recognizable and familiar.

I created this digital collage from three images, including a painting I had done and two photographs I took over the past year; the painting was a copy of Fairfield Porter's The Kittiwake and The John Walton, and the photographs were respectively taken of a lake in New Hampshire and a garden on the Upper West Side in Manhattan. I used Photoshop to digitally combine the three images, playing with the placement and opacities of each of them. Once the images were combined, I also used Photoshop to erase various elements and clean up each of the layers, and also digitally drew some delicate line-work over portions of the piece (i.e. the daisies that make up the lower quarter of the composition and portions of the boats that float on the water).  

This collage was more of a challenge for me than I expected! It took me a long time to combine each of the elements, and I struggled to maneuver each of the layers in a way that created a visually satisfying composition. As it turns out, I might have been a little more confident in Photoshop for collage purposes than I deserved to be. The process of creating this collage did make me slightly more confident, but I definitely still have a long way to go! I really enjoyed the aspect of the digital drawing, and found it to be really aesthetically pleasing within the piece itself. I look forward to continuing to explore each of these processes in the future!