Create a digital collage

Welcome to another article of How to be a beginner?. This week I'm telling you how I made my first digital collage.

Collage craze

When I was on vacation in Christchurch last month, I was caught up in a new craze: I absolutely wanted to learn how to make digital collages. I think the urge to make collages came from the fact that I've been doing a lot of research on zines lately, and it's a widely used technique. A zine, if you haven't read the article on my zine festival signing up, is a paper publication that anyone can create and distribute. I would have made physical collages, cutting up paper, but when I moved to Auckland, I had to do a lot of sorting through my stuff, so I don't have much left to cut up here.

Tools and images

So digital collage seemed more appropriate for my situation. I looked up how to make these collages easily with my tablet. I tried dozens of apps, but none of them really had the features I was looking for. I finally found a combo that would work, but finally when testing Illustrator to make my zines, I realized that it was the best option. In addition to the tools, I had to find the base. But that was the easy part. There are dozens of libraries of completely royalty-free images that can be used in any way, including works of art on display in museums.

Changing idea

Then I moved on to making the collage. The first idea that came to me was to make a collage about my experience in Auckland so far. I thought about the elements I wanted, a big sun, a rain cloud, the sea, hills, the Sky Tower, a mic for stand-up comedy, boats, people walking barefoot in the street... I had a pretty clear idea of what I wanted the result to be. I remembered that I would have to let go of the result, especially the angles of view, which would be different from one element to another because they were from different contexts. I put a time limit on each step so that I wouldn't be completely overwhelmed by the activity and I started looking for images.

And that's where the real difficulties began. I realized very quickly that I was not going to be able to find the elements I needed in the image libraries at all because the information linked to the images is the title of the work, the artist, the date... but there is no description of the elements present in the images. And to go around the thousands of images contained in these libraries seemed to me a little too long for the first step of this new project. So I dropped my idea of a representation of Auckland and I looked for images I liked in the libraries. It was always tedious so I narrowed down my search to styles that I know I like, like impressionism, art deco or modern art. Here, I chose about ten images that appealed to me and put them all in my Illustrator file.

Using the tools

Another type of difficulty was getting used to the software. It was more or less the first time I really used it, at least to do something other than page layout. And like any new tool, you have to learn how to use it. It means testing all the buttons to know what they can be used for and struggling to remove what you just put on the screen because you don't know the vocabulary or the keyboard shortcuts yet. It means searching for tutorials on the internet to find the slightest manipulation, and redoing the search six times because you forgot how to do it ten minutes later.

Doing the collage

I'm not going to give you a course on how to use Illustrator, for one thing I don't have the level, for another it's not the point. However, I can tell you that I learned how to cut out images in more or less precise ways, how to manage the layers on which the images are placed to put them in the right plane, and how to draw simple shapes and color them. I placed the different elements that I cut out where they seemed to make the most sense to me overall but without thinking too much about it because I had already gone beyond the time I had given myself on the subject.

I guess that will be one of the next steps, to combine technique with an artistic vision. The more I try, the more I am impressed by people who have imagination, who have ideas from nothing.

Result

Anyway, this is a finished project, which makes me pretty proud considering how many things I started but didn't finish. I don't think the final result is amazing, the message is not very clear, the whole thing is not so coherent. But I enjoyed doing it, I like the badly cut side that gives the impression that I did it by hand. And then do we really need to have a message and a coherence behind everything we do? Maybe it can just exist?

Let me know in the comments, on Instagram @elisabnfs and TikTok @elisa.bnfs, what you think of this article, if you've ever made collages, what you tried this week.

Next week

I'll see you next week to talk about my attempt of taking pictures with a large angle zoom.