Title: Day and Night
Size: 1.6 cm x 1.9 cm
Completed: November 2023
This project is a collage of images that I took myself. These pictures include friends and family, as well as some random beautiful scenery that was used to create the background. This collage is a result of experimenting with different settings and tools in a website called Photopea. I've always thought of collages as interesting and creative but I have never made one myself. I’ve also never had experience with making art digitally with this website and this combined those two to create this piece.
Size: 1.6 cm x 1.9 cm
Completed: November 2023
This project is a collage of images that I took myself. These pictures include friends and family, as well as some random beautiful scenery that was used to create the background. This collage is a result of experimenting with different settings and tools in a website called Photopea. I've always thought of collages as interesting and creative but I have never made one myself. I’ve also never had experience with making art digitally with this website and this combined those two to create this piece.
Process
I chose 10 pictures from my camera roll, 5 that focused on landscape/scenery and 5 that focused on people.
I started working with all of the landscapes before I got worked with images of the people
I chose to work with this picture I took of the moon first because the background seemed like it would be easy to remove, and since the moon is very small it would be easier to move around. I just placed the image in Photopea and pressed the "Select" tab up above, and clicked "remove background" below it, and it instantly removed that black sky, leaving a clean image of the moon.
Next I wanted to experiment with the 'blur' tool, not to make a transition with another image, but to enhance how blurry the sky looks to me in that picture. I used the blur tool and set the size to 719 px, to cover a lot of space, and the hardness up to 100, just to see how blurry it would get. To my surprise it didn't blur that much, even when the hardness was at the highest level. But since this was part of the background and I knew it would get covered up eventually, I moved on.
To finish the background, I wanted a contrasting transition between the fuzzy sunset, but didn't want a completely dark image, so I placed a picture of a glowing structure from the China Lights show. I didn't want to change it much, so I went to the Filter tab, stylize, and clicked oil paint. I got to mess around with the settings, choosing how clean the oil paint filter should look and how intense it should be. I chose the radius to be pretty big and I lowered the cleanliness of the image, meaning the filter made the photo look more oily.
I wasn't sure how to incorporate the picture of my neighborhood with the sunrise, but I decided that a way to do so was by just putting a little part of the sky to be part of the picture with the parking lot. I still wanted to change that section up because I wanted to try other tools, so I went to 'edit' and chose to use puppet warp. This feature allows you to bend the image at certain points and make weird effects. This tool is the most difficult to use correctly in my opinion because it is very easy to miss click and completely change the format of what your original intentions were. This happened to me, because I wanted to create a wavy effect, but instead I made a fragmented looking effect, far from my intentions. It wasn't what I wanted to make but I liked the way the colors contrasted and still left it in the back.
Before I inserted the last picture with a landscape, I wanted to test how hard it would be to crop out a person. Using the eraser seemed like the least intimidating tool so that's what I used. I experimented with the size and hardness of the tool to see how comfortable I was with it, and it was pretty straightforward to use. I made it bigger for bigger areas to erase (background) and smaller when I needed to get into some more refined areas (closer to the person). I wanted my friend to be on the right side of the collage in front of the photo with the glowing structure, but I felt like she should look as if she was in the photo, and so I added a feature called "inner glow" to her picture. This allowed me to add any color I wanted to the outer edges of her silhouette, and I chose the pink that was the color of the glowing structure.
I wanted to try to use the Magic Cut tool instead of the eraser to see if it would be more convenient. I chose this picture of my mom holding a bird because the background was going to be hard to separate from the subject with an eraser. When using magic cut, there is a green section that you can place around the area of the photo that you wish to keep, and red in the areas that you wish to delete. It isn't necessary to color in every detail in red or green, because the computer analyzes and guesses what you want to keep or delete. The picture on the right shows what you color in for the left picture would look like if it was cut out from the way it was colored. This tool took longer to use than anticipated because there was a lot of detail and it was hard for the computer to differentiate the background from the subject I wanted to keep, so I had to go back over and over to try to fix it as much as possible.
Because the magic tool took longer to work with than expected, I continued to use the eraser tool for cropping the people in my images. Because this collage is for pure experimentation, I decided to mess around with the tools more. I shrunk the image of my brother and added a blur filter on him. I chose motion blur because it seemed appropriate to make him blurry and match the blurriness of the background without having to use the blur tool. I think adding a blur filter and increasing the intensity and changing the distance is more effective and convenient than using the blur tool.
I forgot to take a screenshot of my process for this part (left to right) so I will explain it in the recreation below. (Moon picture used in background to show clearer results)
The transformation of this image was simple. I again, used the eraser to remove the background to the best of my ability. At first I didn't know what I wanted to do with this picture of my friend without blocking out my previous work in the background completely, and without having her at the very front to the point where the collage looked overcrowded. I wanted to make her transparent so she could be in the collage but more subtly. Again, I went to the filter tab and I thought the "color to alpha" option would allow me to make a solid color silhouette of my friend, but instead it gave me a transparency and opacity setting. This did not work the way I thought it would, because it does not change images to either be transparent or not, it changes the saturation and contrast. This option was bizarre, because depending on where the transparency and opacity options were, the image could be bright or dark, solid, or barely transparent. I set the transparency and opacity settings pretty high and got this result.
The last step was to add in the final two images of the landscape and of the people. The last people picture was this picture of my dad and brother with a dinosaur. I just cropped it with the eraser and let it be in the background. The last landscape picture I took was the picture I took at 6 flags with the carousel in the background. I thought that the collage looked too crowded already and I was stuck deciding where to put the image. One thing I really liked about it were the flowers in the foreground and I knew I wanted to include those somewhere. So I selected the rectangle tool, placed a rectangle on the spot I wanted to keep, and deleted the rest. I felt like I needed to do something more than just crop the image, so I went down to the circle icon to the bottom right and changed the color of the image. A warm orange-red looked best to me because it seemed fitting because there was a sunset.
Reflection
Overall I am satisfied with the way that the collage turned out. The process of making this was not the most convenient, because the website would crash a lot and some tools were hard to manage. Other tools were more simple to use than they looked. At first the website looks complicated, but after a while of using it for the project I got used to it. I know that my final piece is not aesthetically pleasing, but that is because this was just experimenting with Photopea. I do like that the website has a lot of options for messing around with an image. To me, the most intriguing and difficult one was the puppet warp, because I didn't use it correctly, but I love the pattern I created by accident. I feel more comfortable using Photopea and technology to create future projects.