Final montage

Before I start detailing my final montage I'll just mention quickly a little on my style of working. I can plan all I want, images, text's and research of all kinds, my final product very rarely resembles anything in the prior work. It would seem this habit has extended to my final image in this project.

My initial sketches depict a rather busy scene, I intended to fit much into this montage of mine. In my final image I came to realise that space was somewhat harder to manage than I had first thought and found myself craving the open space and the bolder statement the images I did include made upon the canvas.

However some of my planning has not gone to waste, I planned (as I do in much of my work) to use a maximum of 2 or 3 hues. As I mentioned, this is the case in much of my work so it was no wonder I decided upon this choice again. As a result the montage is almost entirely black and brown. With some hinting of other colour within.

I am a great admirer of stencil art. I love the black silhouetting and the way images aren't quite there in full. I tried to capture this same effect with my montage. The images have been cleaned up and then had the “stamp” filter applied over the top to give them that duo tonal stencil print quality.

I chose the corrugated card background because I wanted the art to look as though it was printed on an uneven surface. Such as stencil graffiti is often found on brick walls.

One of my aims was to get everything in the image connected via swirls and lines, when I came to adding this element in I found the image became to crowded and lost some of it's impact. Thus I decided the images were better laid out with plenty of spacing between. However, because this had the effect of making the entire image seem a little too empty I added in the staining to the background. The splodges and the very faint lines. This draws all the images together without making the entire montage seem to complicated to look at.

When planning my montage I did a mind map of interests that I could include in my project. A lot of different things came up, originally intending to use as many as I could. Because in this final version i decided to go with fewer images I had difficulty choosing which ones in particular that I wanted to use. I decided to list a few things that I showed interest in within an hour or so. As a result I included:

Clouds, I've always had a fascination for the sky.
Anna, the reason I am where I am today.
Music, hence the phono speaker emerging from the clouds.
A silhouette of my head.
Wine, beer and cigarettes.

The image has been entirely made using Photoshop and images taken from my personal image stock and that of Google images. Image quality wasn't such an issue with the montage as everything had the stamp filter over the top which resulted in any pixelation being smoothed out anyway. The only image I would have liked to get in high resolution would be the background. This image is the only one without a filter over the top.

I am not much pleased with this image. I find the whole thing somewhat empty to look at despite my decisions to reduce the number of images within. On top of that I would have preferred

to remove the white colour from within the stencil images, this isn't something you'd see in real stencils. You'd just have empty space in those areas. However, after removing the white to check what the result would be I found the image to dark and decided to keep it in.

As a summarized conclusion; a reasonable image in need of a few minor tweaks. A good basis from which other more thought out work might spring.

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