20% Time 5/20/08
Well, this week was interesting. All my teachers decided to give out projects at the exact same time, and of course, who doesn’t enjoy the thrill of procrastination? Anyway, this week, I decided to try out that seemingly popular style of picture known as the montage…(I think). Basically, you start off by picking a style (retro with old ads, posters and faded colors; grunge with big spatters, rock equipment -that is kind of optional depending on what you are doing, and dark colors; or even urban with 3D stars, drippy clouds and circles, bars, and cityscape stuff- ex: buildings, graffiti, chain fences, and all that good stuff. If you look around, that style is getting very popular. The only problem with this is that it takes a great deal of time and creativity to prep a really nice piece.
Since I have no stash of picture clips or even one piece of ‘urban’ clip art to my name, I went to a website I found on Delicious called Design Bum by issara. I perused around and decided that I really liked most of his work, especially since he wants to help out the design community and put up everything for download. Now, I was just going to get the pieces called layered 1 and 2, but then I saw a button off on the side that said: “Download all Downloads”. Ooooooh! Needless to say, it was a 233 MB zip file (it contained within it about 20 other zip files). I have entire programs on my flash-drive that take up less memory than that!
Anyway, I got everything set up to get going, and had no idea what to do. I did not just want to copy the whole picture, all that cropping and composing takes time (believe me, I know that now), so looked up some tuts. (By the way, when I opened the layered retro montages, they were about 150 layers each and took about a minute just to open up on my computer, forget about the time it takes to switch between windows). I found a tutorial by SGlider12 right away that really set the base for my picture. For it, I had to open up The Gimp (yes, this program takes up less space than the pictures it can produce) as well as an old picture of me with a hat that I liked. Then, I tried to different color settings. The first was a low color threshold, another was a lighter color threshold. I saved both as jpegs and then used Photoshop to take the parts that I liked from both and merged the layers. After setting the layer to darken, the white all disappeared and I was free to make a background color. I ended up choosing a dull blue that would contrast nice with the yellows and reds that I had from the downloaded montages.
This effect is actually getting very, very popular, so it would do me good to keep working on it. See if you can tell which parts of each I used in the final image.
That was the first part. Next, since there were so many layers, I set my cursor to automatically select any layers I clicked on and just threw those pictures all around to dig for neat little clips. Whenever something caught my eye, I dragged it out, and arranged it on my canvas. For the most part, everything fit and only a few things needed cropping (such as the large brown newspaper up top that originally covered the whole thing, and the torn paper at the bottom that covered the picture too much). Despite all this, I feel that it came out really nice, with its little newspapers, numbers, ads, and those weird pipe/machinery fixtures around the edges- you’ll know what I am talking about in a second. Granted, it is not as filled and busy as the professional montages, but it still carries a cool spirit.
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