CANCER.

Here are some illustrations for the star sign Cancer. One of the words used for their personality is 'moody' so I thought that the stare of Actress Lauren Bacall was perfect. The castle image for the background is actually from one of the photos that I'd scanned in from my grandmothers book! I thought it worked really well and I changed the colour and saturation more on Photoshop so that it wasn't such a contrast against everything else. I personally prefer the top illustration without the tiny symbol overlapping the orange circle, so I will probably decide to work with that as one of my finals. 

ARIES.

So here we have the star sign Aries! I actually found this one really hard to do and I don't know if I am still entirely happy with this one but it's all development so it can't be wrong. One of the traits that I'd found for Aries was 'religious and spiritual' hence the very Madonna-esque woman I used for this. As you can see through each image I played around with the aspect of the horns. Obviously this an integral part of an Aries since their sign is the ram but I just couldn't figure out if I wanted them in or not. So I played around with having them fully in, partially and not at all. I quite like the 3rd one down where it's just a subtle hint at having one horn but then again I like it without. 

I started to play around with some of the images that I'd previously scanned in from my grandmothers books and used a photo of a mountain range. I'd used it without colour at first, just black and white, but it just got lost within the background so thought I'd add colour. I think the blue works well in contrast to the pink of the planet but I might try to see what it looks like in red since that is a colour associated with Aries. 

AQUARIUS.

Here are some collages that I created for the star sign, Aquarius. I really love how these came out and I wanted to keep it feeling very magical and otherworldly. All the images above differ slightly from one another in terms of colour saturation and also the visibility of the tiny constellations and stars which are highlighted inside the circle of water. To be honest I love all of them individually so I don't which one I would choose but they are also still a work in progress so they might change completely! I just want to make sure that I am keeping the progress of my work updated all the time since it's something that will benefit myself, but also the tutors when it comes to marking. There are quite a few more star signs to be done so I shall post them up as soon as! 

GLI ETRUSCHI MITO E REALTÁ.

These are a few more scans from another book I found during my research gathering. I've really been trying to find lots of landscape imagery and I think I've found some good ones to work with, these included. I like how they are all in black and white since they'll be easy to layer over my work but it might be nice to add some colour to them on Photoshop and see how that works out. 

L'IMPERO DEGLI INCAS.

Keeping with the theme of scanning old books in, I came across another lovely one from my grandmothers collection. The book is all about the ancient Incas and Mayans and speaks a lot of their study of the sky and constellations. It has some great photos inside of landscapes in Mexico and Peru so I thought they would be great to scan in and again apply them to my collages. 

L'ASTROLOGIA CINESE.

These are a few scans from a Chinese Astrology book that belonged to my grandmother. She was always fascinated with constellations and star signs so I have lot's of old books that belonged to her which are all so brilliant! This one in particular has lots of lovely drawings inside, along with diagrams etc so I thought it would be nice to scan a few of these in and see if I could include some of the images within my own work. I think a mixture of old imagery/pages would work really nicely with the more modern, clean star signs I've been making. 

REFLECTION - 6.11.2013.

Today I managed to type up around 200 words of my essay (eek). I know it's not that much but I'm glad that I managed to type up anything today since it's still a struggle. Although I was able to grab Glynn just before I was leaving and he read through what I'd written so far, as well as having a little review. He thought that I was heading in the right direction but needed to include more of my own point of view/thoughts on the question I'd chosen. Glynn also mentioned a few artists that I would benefit from looking at and some extra pointers in terms of just slightly altering the essay title and questions that I might include. 

One of the main things that he said I should do was to write up the pros and cons of collage. This is so it gets me thinking about why I like to use it, over any other media, but to also see the negatives. I wanted to type it up onto the end of what I'd written today but realised that my laptop doesn't have Microsoft Word. Eurgh. Anyway, I will type it up onto here then eventually transfer it somewhere else. 

Pros: 

- Using images from old magazines = great colour quality. 
- Able to put exactly what I'm thinking down on paper. 
- Can be as complex or simple and still make an impact. 
- The images can be complete opposites but can be brought/linked together by collage. 
- Get to rework images into having a new and different meaning. 
- Love the boldness it can create. 
- Gives me the chance to make images as surreal as I like. 
- I feel like I can express my thoughts and ideas more with images rather than drawing. 
- I like the mystery and seduction collage allows you to create. 
- I enjoy the process of finding the images and cutting them out. 
- Deciding on the composition of the collages is something I enjoy doing. You can see how many variations you can have by just moving them around on the page. 
- By using current imagery I can make the audience have a stronger connection to the work.

Cons:

- If cutting by hand it can be quite slow. 
- Images from old magazines can be delicate so the paper sometimes rips.
- Digital collage can sometimes take away the texture of traditional collages. 
- The notion of 'stealing' others work (although this can be argued with the fact that you rework the image into something completely new). 
- Checking copyrights on imagery (if selling the work). 
- Looking for imagery can take a very long time and be expensive (!). 
- Need to work to the size of the images you find which can be restrictive sometimes.