Final Collages

This is one of my favourite collages. I started with a picture of Lottie Collins who was a famous singer and dancer. The original was her holding the skirt of her dress and was inspired by Victorian flower arrangements and the popularity of still life paintings of the time. Using this idea, I took various flowers from a few paintings and arranged them to create her skirt. This creates a bold and vibrant effect and brings some colour to the image. It’s also a reflection of her bright personality and what she used to do.

I found an image of a Victorian man juggling and found it very interesting. To turn it into a collage, I had many ideas but liked this one the best. To incorporate other circus acts, I added zebras as animals in the circus was extremely popular at the time. I coloured some parts in to bring some life back to the image and create a cartoony feel. This was to create the idea that the man’s juggling brings life and fun back into the world and transports people to a world of fun. It also helps exaggerate the black and white imagery.

Physicians were very experimental in this era and one of the events is based around this. I created a collage based on an image of a young doctor and a skeleton. I then found an image of a man and made it seem like the doctor transplanted his head onto the skeleton quite brutally. To add some comedy, I added a Victorian apron to the doctor with some blood stains that I left in colour.

I found an image of a Victorian snake charmer and thought of ways to replace the snake. Earlier, I found an image of Houdini performing a magic trick where he appears inside a milk can and thought it would be fun to combine the two. To add something extra too it, I added a patch of Victorian decoration behind it that I feel helps tie it all together.

After many experiments with this image, the one of the strongman balancing the elephants was one I felt worked the best. I tidied it up a bit and felt it needed a pop of colour, so added two lightly coloured ovals over the elephants to help them stand out and emphasised that the man is holding up elephants.

One of the events talks about illusionist Derren Brown and this prompted me to create a parody of hypnosis and trained bears. I simply switched a man for a dancing bear and this was the outcome. I added some texture to help it blend.

Another one of the simpler images was this. I played around with adding the horse to various situations before settling on this dinner scene.

This image was a bit more experimental on my part. I liked having someone on stage but it didn’t always work out so I just thought about having a giant man there instead. I used images of people featured in the events to keep it related to the information.

Although in my research I stated that I liked it to look like the images belonged there, once I started to create an experiment, I found that I liked it when the image looks places. Mainly because I liked to do it in an ironic way in the scene and not create a whole new image using lots of different parts. This was due to struggling to find source material given the only resource to use was google images. I searched various things from Victorian to 1800’s and 19^th century to try and get different results. All of which were still very limited.