Narrative Digital Collage

A visual narrative is a work of art that tells a story. Narratives can consist of anything from simple, visual motifs (elements that repeat) to complex systems of signs and symbols. For this project, you will use photo editing software to create a narrative digital collage. This collage will pay special attention to the visual element of space.

The general theme of this project is “That Reminds Me of the Time When…” I would like this collage to tell a narrative about yourself. The narrative can illustrate a real event from your life, or it can be a pure fantasy. You may use images of yourself and familiar people & places, or you may find images of other people & places as stand-ins. One of the only parameters is that I don’t want you to include text in your collage. Instead of placing the word “Happy” in the center of your project, for example, try to make a scene that conveys a visual sense of happiness. Because this collage explores how things visually appear in space, you will use the principles of overlap, diminishing size and vertical placement. Consult the diagram “Cues to spatial depth” for ways to establish this illusion.

To make this digital collage, you will need to utilize the professional photo editing program Adobe Photoshop. Photoshop is available for you to use on any Mac computer on campus (including those in our classroom, the library and the B-333 computer lab). I have filmed a brief tutorial about using Adobe Photoshop for this project. The tutorial is available to watch in the Project #1 folder under the Assignments tab.

You will need to create an 800 x 600 pixel Photoshop PSD file (as outlined in the tutorial), and save it as (your) lastname_firstname_collage. I want to see at least 10 separate layers in your collage. This includes the background, extra landscape elements, individual figures, etc… You will use the Lasso tool to cut-out images that need to be cut-out, and you will use the Edit->Transform functions to resize the scale of images that need to be resized. Save the file often to ensure that nothing gets lost.

To submit, convert your document into a .jpg file (as outlined in the tutorial), and save the .jpg as (your) lastname_firstname_collage. You will then create a new post on your blog entitled “Narrative Digital Collage”. Upload the .jpg image to this new post and write a brief paragraph describing the scene that you have created. Label the post “Digital collage” along with any other relevant labels.

Materials:

-Access to a computer with Adobe Photoshop

-Digital image files

-Flash drive for saving files