MY CREATIVE PROCESS
INSPIRATION
A majority of my inspiration for this project came from my interest in the fashion industry and prior research that I have done through personal exploration. I have taken a huge interest in fast fashion as I began exposing myself to the truth about where my clothes were coming from. I took an interest in thrifting and buying second hand from online stores as well as researching affordable options for sustainable fashion. Through this research, I was inspired to advocate for these issues and use this project as a way to educate a large audience on something I am passionate about.
ATTENTION MANAGEMENT
As this was the biggest project I have ever taken on, there was a large learning curve with time and attention management throughout my creative process. With the help of the CPSA250 class, I was introduced to a lot of new and useful tools that helped to keep me on track as best as possible. One of the first time management techniques I tried was the Pomodoro technique, which is a method in which you break studio time into chunks with breaks in between designed to maintain focus. While I found this strategy to be effective, I preferred time blocking much more because I felt more creative freedom rather than creating a headspace that prioritized productivity and meeting benchmarks over simply being creative and having fun making art. As expected, I did not always meet the goals I had set for a certain week or set aside as much studio time as I wanted at certain points, but I found that time blocking allowed me to rework my schedule to fit whatever time I could to work on my project and organize my mind so that I could continue making progress in a timely manner. I feel that I have learned a lot about what works for me in terms of time and attention management and I have become much more familiar with my creative process and what strategies work best for me.
TECHNIQUES
MULTI-LAYERING
A technique commonly used in collage in which multiple images or media are overlapped to create a new unified picture. I chose to utilize this technique largely in the "negative" portion of the collage by layering images over used receipts because I wanted to represent the idea of fast fashion and the mass over-production of clothing through cluttered images that are almost too much that the eye is over-stimulated.
CUBOMANIA
A surrealist method of collage in which an image is cut into small squares and reassembled in random order. I chose to utilize this technique for the Earth portion of my collage in order to symbolize the slow destruction of our environment due to these fashion malpractices. The damage that these effects are bringing is rendering our once beautiful planet into something seemingly unrecognizable.
TEXT
Layering text over the images was an important part of my design for the collage because I wanted the words to unify the message of each portion in an obvious and clear way. For example, the word "CRISIS" specifically was placed at the top center of the piece in order to draw attention and alarm to my overall message.
ITERATIVE DESIGNS
Through the completion of this piece, one of my goals was to familiarize myself more with collaging and improve my skills as I am still fairly new to this art form. In researching collage artists and drawing inspiration of different techniques, there were a lot of interesting methods and design ideas that I wanted to try and incorporate into my final work. I went through many different iterations and utilized a large part of my studio time refining skills and testing out new methods that I did not end up using in my final piece. The lesson that we had about "killing our darlings" was especially useful in helping me to finalize my ideas and move forward with creating the final design. It was difficult at first to realize that time spent working on ideas that did not come to fruition was not time wasted, but this assignment allowed me to let go of these concepts and focus on what I actually wanted to incorporate.