For this Collage/Overlap project, I only had a vague idea of having something open to a different world like a portal or a window to view it. So I worked with that idea and started to pick out images from magazines that I thought would work well together and make the idea of viewing into a different world a reality.

When I started to assemble the scraps of magazine paper together to try to form a cohesive image, I started to like the idea of a bedroom having a window that opened up to a weird portal of a world. The curtain of the bedroom picture bothered me and I was about to cut them out completely before getting the idea to cut them out to a certain amount and fold them accordion-style. Doing this made the curtains not take up too much room on the paper and the folded curtains added a small 3D/pop-up element that made this piece all the more interesting to look at.

From there, I liked the idea of having some of the elements of the collage pop out and have a 3D element to the piece, so some of the element pieces of the collage aren’t fully flat on the paper but rather pop out and slightly move when you pick it up. I felt this added to the overall feeling of weirdness and viewing into a different world a lot more versus if I had made every element on the collage flat.

I then decided to focus on finishing up the bedroom part of the piece to make it feel complete. So I tried to gather more pieces of magazine pictures to finish and develop a bedroom. After the piece was done, I decided that I would make the piece have a comic book/cartoonish feel to it by having dark outlines and some white highlights on some of the elements of the collage. I used India Black Ink with a paintbrush to make the black outlines and White Acrylic-Gouache to make the shiny highlights.

In the end, I love the end result of the Collage/Overlap project and what I ended up with was something I didn’t expect to have. Letting my mind guide me through this piece and just seeing whatever I felt would work together seemed to make this piece interestingly weird to look at.