Alright, we're back on track. This post is all about the concept art that will go into the final collage edits - I chose to work it out in Photoshop beforehand rather than draw and erase over and over (I'm much better at vectoring than using hand-eye coordination!).
I used two reference pictures for this one, both taken during my high school years. One is of me attempting to eat a balloon and the other is of a friend of mine jumping through the air.
I first started out just making very intricate Pen Tool paths around the outline of the area I wanted, as you can see above.
I did the same to the other picture, then I cut out these sections and pasted them into a new file. Once they were on there, I filled in another layer with black and made the background white.
This is when the concept became more concept-y: I expanded the borders of the black visual area by 20 pixels (Select --> Expand, 20 px), selected the inverse area (Select --> Inverse), and filled in the surroundings with black.
I did that for both pictures, then for the one of my head, I flipped it horizontally (Image --> Rotate --> Flip Horizontal) and added some text to the left or the right of each flipped version. Then I put them all together and...
Voila! There is the final concept. If you imagine the black area as collage pieces and the white areas as white paper strips, you will have the look I'm going for. In the next and final installment of this series, I am going to be drawing and cutting out those segments to paste onto the collage backgrounds. Then I'll be doing some cool effects with the paper to see how incorporating texture works on it.
But before that can happen, I need to get some glue!
P.S.
Thank you guys for your suggestions! I am going to try and incorporate all the ones that I've gotten so far. You can also keep rolling them in to me by commenting either here or on Facebook.
Take a look at the rest of this collage process in steps one, two, three, and five.
You can also check out some more posts featuring my photography.
