The Arrival of the Ax6!
(click to see the big one)
Ladies and gentlemen. The Ax6. Is here.
What I wanted to do was do a collage that was a commentary on what a Photoshop collage is, based on the ideas from the Benjamin article. Probably, if I hadn't kept condensing things to keep better track of my layers (because that's the way I work with Photoshop- once I have it the way I want it, I rasterize and merge), it would have about 35-ish layers, including the ones I deleted from the final image. I think the actual PSD (which McChris can see here) has around a dozen or so.
So, yeah, lets talk about what's on here and what I did.
- The Mona Lisa thing is the thing that seems to catch peoples' eyes pretty quick. That's a pretty blatant statement of what Benjamin was getting at.
- Above that there is the cover of the last Moby album, and a still from Ashlee Simpson's SNL appearance. That's a throwback to the conversation about authenticity in music we once had in class.
- Above them is an early photograph of a crowd dressed all victorianish. The "?"s on their faces are a sort of an attempt at a comment on identity. Sort of. Not really.
- To the right of that, is part of Andy Warhol's head. We could open up a whole can of worms on whether he was a genius or a hack because of his postmodernist derivative style, and that's why he's on here.
- To the right of Mr. Warhol, we have a picture of assembly line workers from the Ford plant making a Model T. Mass production, etc. etc.
- To the right of that are six multicolored copies of David by Michaelangelo. I wanted a text label explaining what I was getting at here, but the screen was already blindingly busy as it was. What I wanted it to say was something to the effect of:
"If he could have made lots of them, would we know who he was 400 years later?"
- Next to him is a still from the Buggles' Video Killed the Radio Star video. You could write an entire paper on the irony of how a song that critiques a consumerist flash-in-the-pan pop culture became the pop anthem of the 1980's.
- Bottom center is Quentin Tarantino. He's on here for the same reason that Warhol and the Buggles are.
- Finally, bottom right, is a question about what this collage is as a whole.
Alright, so that's content. Let's talk design. What I wanted to do was do a Photoshop montage that doesn't look like a Photoshop montage. I'm a bit of a Photoshop snob, and I get sick of seeing the same old poorly-selected regions pasted onto a gradient background with a lens flare. I wanted to use Photoshop to create a montage that looks like it could have been made of paper elements and glued onto a backboard. So, no obvious filter use (save the color halftone).
Also, since I wanted to make each individual element look like it was cut out solidly, I couldn't use blend properties on the individual layers, so I had to be creative with the actual order of the layers. And, I wanted everything that wasn't a cut out element to look like it was put directly onto the collage. So, lots of monospace, typewriter-like fonts, and for the big letters across the center of the page, a blend was used to make it look like it was stamped onto the image at the end with a very wet, watery ink. So, there was some grain added, a blur done, it was turned diagonal, and the blend was changed to Linear Burn.
In summary, I am glad to be finished.
posted by Baylor at 6:13 PM
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