From the draft of my collage to the final product, I am very pleased with how it turned out! My blog is about living life happily and to the fullest– also not wasting a moment of it. I conveyed this aspect quite literally through the medium of words infused in my collage. This is seen in the “HAPPINESS” and “TRAVEL” designs. I incorporated pictures I took while traveling and pictures of my friends, and girlfriend. Having great people surrounding you is an easy way to be happy in life. This is why I chose to represent that in my project.

In my initial post, I also compare life to a roller coaster. This can also be seen in my project (the “V” in “TRAVEL” contains an image of me on a roller coaster, actually– I know, clever). The actual roller coaster graphic used in the top, right corner of my collage was sourced from MGN: a site I have a subscription to that allows me to download and use images, free of copyright infringement.

My initial draft began with my background. I took five or so photos from places I have traveled. These include London, Venice, and Florence. I created a pattern of these images to use. I believe they make an otherwise dull background quite dynamic. Next, I used the polygonal lasso tool and outlined a picture I had of the Basilica of Santa Croce. I made this selection a layer of its own and dragged it into my background. That was the extent of my rough draft.

Now for the exciting part! After doing peer evaluations, I gained inspiration from one of my peer’s draft collages. She used images in the shape of flowers in place of letters of words she had in her collage. I took this initial idea and built off of it to get to my final product. First, I used the Horizontal Type Tool and wrote out “Life is a…” and “ROLLERCOASTER”. I then adjusted the size, and font. In addition, I added a stroke effect to the text layers to help it stand out. I then proceeded to add a sky background behind the words so they were a bit more visible in lieu of scattered smaller images. Next, I inserted the roller coaster graphic behind the wording. To do this, I moved the graphic’s layer in front of the wording. After adding the words at the bottom, I then took the inspiration I gained and implemented it. I took four separate images, and used the lasso tool to cut them in the shape of the letters they correspond to. For most of them, I used the Content-Aware Scale so the actual images wouldn’t lose shape. I added stroke effects of different colors to the images to give them an extra pop. The words at the bottom also had this, but in black. This was a very tedious process, but I believe it turned out amazing. Lastly, to add more distinction and organization, I used the Rectangle tool to add a bright read border and divide to the words at the bottom.

The last revision I added was cropping the lasso selection of the Basilica. The border overlapped with the border of the pictures in the background, so I edited this to line it up. The last step– I added a stroke effect to the Basilica to, again, make it pop!