ASSIGNMENT 3: Cut & Paste: Digital Collage Poster Design Theme

To get a better understanding of how the Adobe Software works (Illustrator/Photoshop) this assignment allows you to cut and paste images you find in magazines/photos/web/original images and combine those into a 12x18 digital collage to be printed.This simple design process will allow you to understand the software of your choice while also designing a contemporary image that could be art in it'self.


Here are some past student designs using photoshop:

The collages below are from archival advertisements and throughout the history of collage design:

Size: 12x18
Media: Photoshop/Illustrator/Printed Materials
Printed for Critique
Influences:  You should be able to name a particular artist/designer who influenced your design.
That means some research into the artist of your choosing. Your design can still remain unique to your own point of view and artistic vision but you should have at least investigated an artist/designer who might have given you new insight into the collage process.

You could even use magazines/paper/printed materials and cut out images first and then scan them as a printed digital file. Think outside the creative box on this.

Theme: Choose a theme of your own choice that might apply itselt to the images you find and digitally collage to the format. All themes are open to you. Think of something you wish to say using found imagery (photos and type included) and then take a look at the history of collages in art.

It could be a portrait or landscape or something that is of concern to you like saving the environment, time change, religion, sexuality, politics or even some subject that might seem controversial. Experiement in visually telling a story through cut/paste method.

Due Date: TBA

A Cut-Down History of Collage

By Lauren Wallach

Courtesy of Artspace

 

"Collage is the twentieth century's greatest innovation." — Robert Motherwell

"After Picasso and Georges Braque, collage became the most consequential visual-art form of the twentieth century." — Peter Schjeldahl

While artists have been layering images and incorporating autonomous elements into their work since the advent of paper, collage truly emerged as a medium in its own right in the early years of the 20th century with the Cubist experiments of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. The duo coined the term “collage” (from the French verb “coller,” meaning “to glue” or “to stick”) to describe works composed from pasted pieces of colored paper, newsprint, and fabric, considered at the time to be an audacious intermingling of high and low culture. It revolutionized modern art.

Whereas the artists’ earlier Cubist phase, known as “Analytic Cubism,” was comprised of paintings that fragmented the world into a series of basic lines and curves, this later period of “Synthetic Cubism” involved combining fragments of various materials to create a new whole. In Picasso’s iconic Still Life With Chair Caning (1912), perhaps the most famous work of this period, the artist playfully renders a tabletop still life by incorporating everyday elements like newspaper and rope, as well as a trompe-l’oeil piece of mass-produced oilcloth printed with a chair-caning pattern.

Inspired by Cubist experiments, artists associated with Dada—particularly the movement’s Berlin branch—began incorporating collage techniques into their work. Hannah Hoch, Richard Huelsenbeck, John Heartfield, and others pioneered the technique of photomontage, using preexisting photographs, often drawn from mass-media sources, to create composite images that sharply critiqued German society and culture in the aftermath of World War I.

Drawing on the foundations of Dada, neo-avant-garde artists of the 1950s like Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns created assemblages that brought collage techniques into three dimensions—laying the groundwork for much contemporary sculpture—as well as works on paper that incorporated found elements drawn from the mass media and everyday life. Likewise, the incorporation of materials and images culled from mass culture and consumer goods was a signature of Pop art, exemplified by collage-based works like British artist Richard Hamilton’s Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing? (1956), which ironically parodied the lifestyles peddled in advertising through the direct inclusion of its imagery.