Blog 3: Collage

For this assignment, we made a collage using images from various magazines that appealed to us and arrange them in the form of a pattern on a large piece of paper. Using two magazines I brought with me, a Sports Illustrated and an Architecture Boston magazine, as well as two other magazines brought by our professor, I flipped through and ripped out any image that was of something I liked, such as a wave and fish, or anything image that I found interesting regardless of what the actual content was, such as the infrastructure diagram and the odd patterns from a science magazine. I continued this process until the time was up and ended up with several types of images, a wave, a mountain, fish, skylines, nature, coffee, pillows, various forms of art, a blank face, and some graphs. Next I arranged these images into same groupings of what the images meant to me, things of interest (wave, mountain, fish, map, skyline, nature) things of pleasure (art, coffee, sleep, sports) thing of work or profession (architecture, graphs, diagrams) and finally just random images (face, patterns, colors). The first patterns I noticed after the collage was posted on the wall were cool colors, interconnectedness, water, line, art, interest, pleasure, profession, grouping, and descending scale.

After posting my collage on my blog and allowing other students to comment, it appears as though many of the comments agree with each other as well as what I thought about my collage. The patterns that appeared most was a use of water and nature elements, which I feel is most likely due to the upper right hand corner of the waves, plant, fish, and mountains, the use of everyday things and art, which is most likely with the lower half of the collage, and finally a use of darker colors, which is mainly due to the combination of cool colors from the water elements and the dark colors of the lower half of the collage. As far as someone looking at this collage without any knowledge of my intensions, I feel that my collage in a way spoke for itself since most of the comments agreed with both each other and agreed with what I thought about the collage. The comment that stood out to me the most was Geoff’s comment of “There are pictures with ‘everyday use’ objects so that combined with the pictures of nature and idea of travel could make this collage a good representation about enjoying the simple things in life.” Although this was not exactly what I was aiming for while creating the collage, I feel as though it is a very accurate summation of me as a person. I found this to be very surprising that my personality read that strongly through the visual representations of the collage even with it not being my end goal while creating the collage.

Overall I found this exercise to be very fun and useful for visually representing thing we liked. What I enjoyed most about this was how we were thrown in to the assignment with a short amount of time to complete it that it did not actually allow me to think about what I was looking for, which I think may have helped me subconsciously pick what I found appealing rather than spending too much time consciously thinking about what I was picking.