Montage reflection

Allison Wilson
Memory in My Skin

Photoshop for Computer
February 21,2015

     The main things I used during the making of the piece were the layer blends, he and saturation, brushes, transformation tools, color replacement tool, cut and paste tool, feathering, and many images from the internet. The idea was to make a piece that symbolizes an important memory, I struggled to pick a memory because each one seemed just unusable. I never found one that I really liked so in the end I just picked one. I struggled with the theme of Anime North. Not to be too obvious but I picked Toronto as the background because that is where Anime North was held.
     The mask is supposed be representative of the people in costumes. The steam punk locket depicted all the awesome steam punk stuff we saw and how I totally fell for that style their. There's a compass because of the symbol of the conference is a compass pointing north. The skeleton with footprints is the reflection of the long wandering that we did. The straw hat the skeleton is wearing, well, I thought it could represent a character that was the most popular one that people dressed up as at the conference.
     I put a lot of different multicolored things in the picture, like the pencil ends and stars and sparkles. The books are supposed to represent the diversity of characters at the con which are generally book characters. The fire that looks like it's burning the books is to represent the hot temperatures that day.
     I tried my best to get the eye moving around but I don't think that the eye moves around the picture. The piece is asymmetrical to be unpredictable. I used emphasis on the mask by making it brighter, bigger and colorful with lines pointing to it. I tried to have the eye start at the mask and follow skeleton down to the footprints up through sparkles onto the books.  I think together the individual pieces don't work well. Together all of them are trying to be the one thing that catches your eye, expect for the footprints and they more clash than work together.
     There was no other motivation; I felt absolutely no passion or emotional feel for this piece and I simply don't really like it. The only real excuse I can think in regard to it was that I enjoyed the pure experimental things to try with photoshop.
     The visual idea is kind of trying to find what works with the memory; however, I guess I just couldn't find an idea that I liked to illustrate the memory. My favorite part of the piece is the book on the left-hand side. The fire on the books is burning out of the fanning book; it's one of the only elements that just worked together and has just a good flow to them. The sparkles surprised me; I didn't think that I would get so carried away with them.  And in the end they did not help at all in bringing the piece together.
     With additional time I would brainstorm a little more and look for more ideas for way better inspiration. I might go through my memory box or old photos to find a better memory. Maybe I would still go through with same idea but thinking more about what I wanted to show about the memory and look at better symbols for the elements that I wanted to show.  I would just use better planning for the symbolism in the whole piece to improve the flow of the piece.