In Scott McCloud’s book, “Understanding Comics” he states that the definition of comics: “Juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer”. With my collage comic, I believe it fits in his definition as it is a cluster of images that we intentionally placed in a specific order to provide enough information to gather the story behind the entire piece. My piece conveys the work I am currently putting into collage and is also a reflection of what I hope to do in the future. I hope to work around graphic design as well as creating portraits for others on the side. On the bottom right is a photo of my parents and I as well as the objects that I always keep on me that represent them. At first, my piece was just going to be a cluster of objects that I always keep on hand and that are in general important to me. But after further discussions and reading in class, I found out that it would be hard to gather a story out of a bunch of random objects without contexts on their meaning. One of the few objects that I kept from that past idea were the bracelet and watch but I also added a photo behind them to give it a little bit of context that they were from my parents. The rest of the objects in the collage were placed in a specific position in order to tell the story of a person at work, doing art through a physical and digital platform. I also put a cup of coffee in the piece to represent the long nights the person would stay up to finish a project before a deadline.

This wasn’t my first time using photoshop but it was the first time I used it for this kind of purpose. In the past I would use photoshop to create and edit images/flyers but I have never used it to create a collage. The tool that was definitely the most helpful tool was the “quick selection tool” in order to get a clear cut outline of each object. As well as the “select and mask” option in order to adjust the outline to get it more precise. I would also say that the “clipping mask” option was also another great technique to learn in order to be able to edit one layer while not effecting the others in the process. I would say that the only confusing part of this project was getting the pixel dimensions down for the objects and the image as a whole. Overall, I definitely love composing in a digital environment mainly because you could always go back if something isn’t how you like it. There is just a lot of tool at your disposal when working digitally.