Mixed Media-Polaroid Collage

The strongest area of my work is how everything flows together. I like that the background matches the color of my shirt in the photo and the green of the grass and yellow in the background compliment each other. I also like how I was able to include text in my own handwriting. The quote, which is by a well known soccer player, also fits in with the soccer photo I chose. The area of my work that can be improved upon is my use of the tools to alter the photo. I changed the color of the grass in the photo but didn't want to change the color of my shirt. I didn't know how to erase the changes from part of a photo but keep it in other places so I just duplicated the photo and cropped out the parts I wanted to show through.

Placing the Polaroid boxes was the only easy part about this assignment. I had an idea of what I wanted to do already and was able to do it when I started. I put the Polaroid boxes in the right upper corner and bottom left corner and created a kind of tunnel effect where they became larger as they approached the upper right hand corner. The most difficult part about this assignment was trying to include some mixed media or art. I struggled with this because I am not good at drawing at all. However I was able to include a scan of a quote I hand wrote. I liked the way the scan came out and was able to use tools to move around certain words and manipulate the scan to make it look the way I wanted and fit in my piece. I also found it very cool that I was able to remove the white part of the background from the scan. Another difficult part of this assignment was choosing a background for the piece. I was torn between 2 on the internet. But after getting some help from Miss Cabral I found that it was possible to combine the two and merge them into one. I didn't that this was possible prior to this assignment and playing around with the different effects until I found one that looked best was cool. 

As far as materials go I used a photo my dad took of me playing soccer last year. Finding a photo that would work was also very difficult because I needed one that would be big enough and not blurry when I opened it on Photoshop and everything I had on my phone was very blurry. I also used 2 backgrounds that I merged from the internet. I used a Polaroid box which I turned and changed the size of using the transform tools. I also used a scanner to scan in a quote by one of my favorite soccer players that i hand wrote. I learned to use auto select tools and show transform tools while doing this assignment. I also used the transform tools to alter the size of the Polaroid boxes(I held shift while changing size). I also used the lasso tools and layers tools a lot. I was able to try a lot of things I haven't worked with before in this assignment. I demonstrate the objective in this art activity by using a self-portrait and original image for my picture. i included a foreground, mid ground and background as well as a scan in for my form of fine art on the foreground. I also included typography when I included the scan of my quote. If I could do this art activity again I would want to do it with a picture of a favorite artist or someone other than me. I feel that this would allow me to be more creative with the background and piece of fine art I add. If I were to do this activity again using the same photo I would try and place the Polaroid boxes in different places because the placement of some of them could be a bit awkward. Overall though I am proud of my piece.