Exercise 6: ‘Cut-ups’

For this exercise, I used a copy of the Daily Mail and one of the Daily Mirror.

When I cut the rectangles, I tried to leave it to chance by not paying attention to the contents and just focussed on cutting pieces of different sizes.

Once I had gathered dozens of pieces, I looked at how I could reassemble some of them to create interesting combinations. Here are the collages I created.

I then put the collages in Photoshop and did a few adjustments. Below are the final collages.

I looked at collages in Pinterest for inspiration and it helped me to see how I could create different stories from the original images. In the first collage for instance, the football player was celebrating a goal but by keeping only part of the image, it looks like he is screaming at the dog who is running away. The unusual proportions between the size of the dog and the man add a bizarre dimension to the whole image. Something similar happens with the third collage where two scenes that do not belong to each other are brought together. The fourth collage is very different. I tried to have two scenes interlaced with each other to emphasise the actions that are taking place. With the sixth collage, I actually cut out a football player to place him in a different setting, so the technique is different and more intentional. This creates a different story where we can wonder what he is running from. The two images used in the second collage were illustrating articles about fashion and famous people but, by combining them, the expressions on the faces can be interpreted differently and it looks as if one is trying to get away from the other.

Leaving it to chance when I cut the pieces made it more challenging at first but it also meant that I had to explore further the potential of the images. In a sense, I had to make do with what I had and that prevented me from being distracted by too much choice or creating something beforehand in my head and looking for the images that would work.

I like how these collages can be the start of a different story and could be part of new images/illustrations.