Constructing Lunacopia

Yeah I should have been doing a bunch of other stuff, but due to a long run of boring work combined with more interesting projects getting postponed for months on end, I had to make something visual that actually got finished for sanity retainment purposes.

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When doing a collage piece I generally choose one book or magazine as the source material, and use only images from that. This constrains the amount of choices to make in image selection, and usally means your material will have a consistent style & texture.

The source material for this work is a visual encyclopedia from 1976. It’s a thousand-odd pages, which means further choices must quickly be made in order for the amount of possible material to be manageable.

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The encyclopedia is laid out per page in a 7x24mm vertical grid with 3mm gutter, meaning most larger images will crop down nicely to standard sizes. I disregard the gutter & cut my foamboard down to fit an 8x24mm grid instead.

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Initial selection of background images has been made & I’ve started cutting down a good selection of fruit, plants & vegetables for my fill-ins.

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Starting to paste everything down, top 1/3 goes smoothly.

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2/3 of the way down I’m running out of fruits & leaves. This means it’s back to the encyclopedia for another several hours of cutting extra material…

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Done. I swapped out some images at the bottom as the ones I’d originally selected turned out too light. Overall I’m pretty happy with this piece of work. There are only two things I consider mistakes, and one thing I’d change if doing it over, which is pretty good going for a collage piece with this many parts. You’ll just have to guess what those are.

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Excuse the shitty phone photos. At some point I may do a good scan & some color correction for prints if there’s interest. Remember kids, always clearly mark your blunt scalpels!