In the beginning I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. After I decided to use the poster that I bought at WSU as an inspiration, that’s where I started to get an idea of what my theme was going to be. There was a forest in the poster as well as mountains in the background, and I thought it was great, in a sense where I can also use that to represent where I’m from, which is Oregon. There was already a sense of quirkiness in the poster, too, like the bear in the back, so I decided to play off of that and added more interesting, weird things to the collage. I would say I definitely took inspiration from this poster and combined it with who I am and where I come from.

I made my color scheme mainly green to represent the greenery of the Northwest. I had clear rounded pins in my room so I thought it would be cool to make it a look like raindrops because Oregon does rain a lot all year around.  I also wanted to add the map of the buses from the bus schedule book at WSU, and specifically chose the coffee route because I am a big coffee person. I added some quirks by putting in an easter egg, which are the eyes that I drew and scanned and put it in the sky because since this poster itself was already quirky, I thought why not add more weirdness to it. It also gives the audience to find something new in the collage. I also scanned a necklace because I thought it might be interesting to try to scan it even though I wasn’t planning on using it. Turns out it kinda looked like a vine so I thought it was appropriate for my theme.

I feel as though there is a lot of harmony in the collage. There is a color scheme of mainly greens and some grey, with other accent colors as well. I really tried to play off of the greenery of the Northwest by using many shades of green. Even if you look at the circles you can see that they are all different shades of green even though some look similar, like the two dark greens and the two light greens. I feel like that gives it more dimension to the collage. There is one image that is bigger than the rest where your eyes immediately go to, which creates dominance. Although the leaf below is as large in size as the word “express”, because the leaf is green, it blends in with the background. As for the word, it is a bold yellow color that is easy to catch the audience’s attention.

If you start from the word “express” your eyes flow down to the necklace, which directs you to the map and so on, giving it some juxtaposition even if it’s not a traditional looking comic. It still has that flow of juxtaposition even it seems like a clutter at first. In another sense it also tells a story, as well. If you follow the sequence it looks like a story of this guy who took a bus to the woods and brought his bike with him. That is another way of looking at it. I think collages are interesting because it’s not just one thing, there are many elements and dimensions to them.