This piece was full of highs, lows and everything in between! It started out as quite a simple idea inspired by a photo I took last year of two seagulls on a rock with houses behind. This would make for a nice collage I thought, and with a deadline looming for when this piece of art needed to be completed I jumped straight on to Pinterest to gather more pictures for a mood board and began quickly scribbling down very rough thumbnails.
I really wanted the main seagull in the piece to be the brown patterned one in the photo I had taken - that amount of texture is just begging to be collaged! I realised I would have to change the composition of the image a lot to have it work in collage as the bird could very easily get lost on top of all that rocky texture, so the plan went as follows: in the background with a few mountains and little houses, sea in the mid ground creating a blue background for the seagull to pop on top of in the foreground, oh and have the bird looking after its eggs… lovely, a little bit of story telling. Little did I know the flaw in my plan!
Unaware of the issue with this concept I chugged along with the usual routine, painting paper, trying to get really specific textures to use on the seagull, and cutting out some rough shapes.
It was at this point I was hit with the dreaded art block, or maybe I was just on the edge of art block? Either way, creating this bird felt like an impossible task. Collage at the best of times is a slow process, so collage in the middle of feeling like every creative bone in your body had shrivelled up into little raisins is miserable! Now I know, I’m being very dramatic, but with a deadline looming (with this piece being the main focus of a sponsored Youtube video) I was feeling very defeated. Then the penny dropped, I realised the bird I was collaging was in fact a juvenile seagull, and wouldn’t have eggs. My idea was flawed and not only that I hated the way it looked!
Now I am usually the type of person who pushes through the ugly stage of a piece of art with the hope it will start to look nice with a bit more time - trust the process and all that. But I really don’t think there was any saving this one and I knew it was time to give up. With a whole day wasted, I went to bed one sad and annoyed girl. I knew I needed to come up with a better concept, so the following day I made a new mood board, still seagull focused but with a lot more movement.
Still feeling extremely creatively drained I managed to pull this sketch off which felt like a huge win after the disaster from the day before. This time I took my time with the sketching process (unlike my first idea which I rushed) and popped together a quick colour mock using photoshop. Pleased with my plan I moved on to paper painting.
With around 15 sheets of various ocean based textures made, I moved on to the final piece. I spent hours trying to make this collage work traditionally, which unfortunately I don’t have any photos of. I was very deep in the ‘I hate art’ frame of mind and when I get like this, the last thing on my mind is taking a picture. But trust me your not missing out on much! So another day had passed with not much to show for it, but hey at least I did a nice sketch. I went to bed tossing and turning, trying to solve the art puzzle in my mind - how on earth can I bring what I have in my head to life. The answer was photoshop! There are some ideas which are nearly impossible to make traditionally, so having the freedom to edit textures, resize, reshape and everything else photoshop has to offer can open up so many more artistic potential. But It wasn’t going to be easy!
So, three days in and now on my third attempt at making art I was getting very desperate. As soon as I woke up I was straight in to the art room scanning the textures I had painted and cut up the day before, to piece together on photoshop.
I even ripped up paper and photographed it, so I could take advantage of that lovely ripped edge to give my edited paper a more realistic look. For the three main birds in the piece, I collaged them traditionally as trying to make something as intricate as these on photoshop would have been a nightmare!
As for the rest of the birds, I painted them in watercolour. I knew I wanted the piece to be filled with birds but if I collaged them all to the same level of detail as the ones above, it would be way to busy. Instead I opted for outlines and silhouettes of birds which I scanned in and edited to create the look of a busy overlapping bird filled sky, without taking away from the focal point of the main seagull.
I spent three days on photoshop piecing together this digital collage, and let me tell you, it was a very slow and tedious process with many, MANY layers, but I got there in the end. When I first finished this piece, I was very on the fence about it, but not sure if I even liked what I had spent the past five days trying to make. But having had some time away from it, and with some fresh eyes, I’m pretty pleased with it, and I would even go as far to say I like it! So there you go, I hope this blog post goes to show that art doesn’t always go as smoothly as it seems, but with a bit of time it always manages to get there. It’s okay to start again If something isn’t working out. Art is just one big puzzle, and we’re the people trying to solve it no matter how many attempts it takes.
