Photomontage

The goal of this task was to experiment with Photoshop to create a complete pictures made up of other images. I decided quite early on that I wanted to make a poster to advertise something. Thinking of what resources I had closely available to me I decided to create an ad for Lea & Perrins: Worcestershire Sauce.


First of all I conducted some research to find out more about the product. I found out it was first sold in 1838 in Worcester by John Wheeley Lea and Henry Perrins. It used mainly to flavour meat or fish dishes. When I spoke to people about the brand a lot of the younger people I spoke to admitted to never trying it before. When asked why a lot of them commented it looked old fashioned (below is a picture of the bottle.)

I looked at a number of different adverts, artists and styles and was inspired by many of the silkscreen styles I saw.
This iconic silkscreen by Andy Warhol still looks fashionable and unusual today. As does Wang Guangyi's with its bright, eye catching stripes.

Final Design

As you can see my inspiration for this piece is obvious. I have used the techniques of Andy Warhol and Wang Guangyi to create a funky and modern image. The composition has been manipulated by the stripes that draw in the reader's eye to center on the product.
I have used the most relevant and iconic building of Worcester - the Worcester cathedral which represents the product's history. I have then added young, dancing silhouettes to add energy and appeal to a younger audience.
The fonts I have used are also to highlight the product's image. The top font is old and sensible looking, similar to the style printed on the bottle. Whereas the bottom text's font is its polar opposite. Its heavy, modern and exciting.
The reason I picked a contrast in fonts was to keep the market the product already appeals to but to also draw in more attention from young people.

First Task - Create three designs based on a theme

As the title says; for the first task I had to decide upon a theme and create three different images based upon it. I was very enthusiastic to begin this task as I haven't had much practise with Photoshop before and was excited to start improving my skills.

With my limited knowledge of the program I didn't want to try to be too ambitious to begin with and rather used this as an opportunity to get familiar with Photoshop's tools, therefore I decided upon a simple theme of

day and night. To make it a little more interesting I put the sun in a dark night and the moon in daylight.

I began by getting a picture of the sun and moon from the internet to study and then used these as a reference.

This is my first attempt. I used another picture of the sky and then used the eyedropper tool to match it to my background.

After getting a moon from the internet I found an image of a confused face and lowered the opacity and saturation to make it blend. It was hard to show it was daylight with just a simple, blue background so I added a flock of birds.

Overall I was disappointed with my final design, mainly due to its quality but also because of reasons pointed out to me by my learning team. One of the comments was that the face in the moon doesn't make sense. He doesn't look that "confused" which on reflection I see their point. Although visually it was a failure, I learnt a lot about some tools on Photoshop such as: the pen tool, adjusting colours, opacity and the magic wand.

My second design was a slight improvement on my first. It was more visually exciting as there were more elements and colour. This design helped me to focus on using filters.

My final image combined the new skills I'd learnt from the other designs.

Overall I am pleased with how this task developed. Although my designs weren't visually the best I have learnt a lot about Photoshop. If given the opportunity to do it again I feel that I could considerably improve these designs.

Introduction

Over the course of this module I will use this blog to track my progress. It will include my research, tasks and how I went about completing them and my final project.