COLLAGE 3: ACROSS MY DESK
A digital foray ft. work from Pull Letter UK SS25
This week, I'm sharing my first digital collage. I'm learning how to use Adobe suite (as I'm doing a few courses at fashion school right now that require it), so an exercise in layering and masking to visualise a creative concept in Photoshop was helpful. I tried to let go of my perfectionism and focus more on the idea I was exploring vs. perfect technical execution. I'm quite happy with how it came out, and I'll keep refining my skills.
In the collage, 'Across my desk', I wanted to play with office-related imagery and the parallel themes of boredom and escapism. This is generally quite in vogue in art direction at the moment (just look at Miu Miu's styling and visuals for the last few collections, or FKA twigs's music video for Eusexua). I knew I also wanted to incorporate ludic elements of physical collage, as that's something I've been working a lot on recently, and - like doodling - it's the kind of thing you'd do if you had a dull desk job and wanted to pass time. Also, I enjoyed the irony of trying to make digital images look like they've been printed on paper, cut up, and crumpled a bit (which is possible with textures and masking in Photoshop).
For composition, I took a relatively bland stock image of a desk as a background, and layered on an image of an open book, angling and cropping parts so the view felt a little more 'undone' and intimate. On top of the book, I added four cut-out figures from a fantastic recent editorial, in Pull Letter's UK magazine (a new-ish biannual fashion publication; their shoots are really cool). I particularly love that the images are shot top-down, and think it's a great example of how a simple but novel perspective can create a really fresh effect. I added some cut-out masking tape as layers, too, to make it seem like the figures are only temporarily in place on the page (maybe to be removed/hidden from a boss or colleague). I put a light drop shadow on all of the foreground elements.
The title, 'Across my desk', was a play on the common corporate turn of phrase (to indicate something you are given at work, usually for review), the irony being that if you're collaging fashion magazines at work, you're probably not focusing on whatever has come across your desk. There’s also a dual meaning in that the figures look as though they're literally walking across the desk (to this point, it helps a lot that the top-down perspective is maintained in the different elements of the collage).
I'd love to share more of my work as my courses progress and (hopefully) I improve my skills, plus any interesting bits of theory (e.g. on colour/composition) I pick up.
Until next time!
