Week 4: Collages - Craft Focus

The process of making this collage wasn’t that difficult but it did require much work. I made this by taking a picture of a chicken nugget, which I painted, than used the picture of it to create a collage. There were many steps in creating this. First, my classmate chose a picture from my album that could easily be isolated. The picture chosen was of a chicken nugget I painted to represent Ronald McDonald. Next I opened this picture with Photoshop. My first attempt in isolating this chicken nugget, I used the rectangular marquee tool and the polygonal lasso tool. This made it easy to delete the edges and background around the nugget. After learning what different tools did, I redid my cutout. In my final attempt in cutting out this nugget, I used the magic wand tool. This allowed me to easily delete the background which was all the same color. After only having a few areas to clear out, I used the eraser tool. This allowed me to erase everything else I wanted to be out of the picture. I was able to make a circle out of the chicken nugget which I wanted to do. Once I had my final cutout, I clicked Select then Select All. This allowed me to copy the cutout. After copying this, I opened a blank file on Photoshop. Going to Edit, I clicked paste six times. This gave me six layers. Having to change the background color, I unlocked the title background and chose hot pink for the background color. Once arranging the cutouts in rows of threes, I picked the top, middle nugget to be the one that stood out. I clicked on the layer and drug it to the top so it could be on top of the other layers, standing out more.  I wanted to change the contrast, specifically the color of this nugget. I chose the color blue and raised the saturation of it which intensified the color and also gave the nugget a different texture from the others. I arranged it this way because I wanted it to be neat and in order but have one of them standing out. I am controlling the viewers by changing the contrast on one specific nugget which will draw the viewer’s eye straight to it. This is a collage of chicken nuggets. There is no specific meaning. I am trying to say that by changing one specific element in a picture such as contrast, lines, or scale, it will draw the viewer to pay attention to that specific change.