Yesterday’s workshop was a good reminder of the amount of work it takes to make a collage. I mentioned before my amazement that Ernst made his book in three weeks, but actually attempting to make my own was a reminder of just how impressive Ernst’s work is. It was a fun experience to browse through magazines looking for images that would work well together in a collage. I became more aware of how much precision is required in cutting to get a good image that doesn’t look like it’s been pulled from multiple sources. Frequently the images in magazines have text or other things on the image that aren’t necessarily something I would want to include in my print, so I had to make choices of whether to try to cut out the object or leave it in the image and put it into my collage. I also thought about the fact that since we were using many different magazines, the sizes of images varied. In some pictures the people were the main focus of the page and in others they were in the background. Finding images that work together spatially and proportionally takes a lot of work if you’re looking to make a cohesive, consistent image. This workshop gave me even greater appreciation for Ernst’s work.
