One of the images from my final in Digital Montage

It’s been a busy Spring semester and I have a few minutes to think about this class.  I originally took this class based on the strength of the instructor, Shannon Ayres, and Iwas not disappointed.

Montage/collage is a huge area.

Most students attempted photo-realistic works and the results were generally fair – this probably lead to fair grades.  The best work from another student, IMHO, was down by embracing the subject and then creating non-realistic narrative works.  This makes the collage/montage work more sculptural .  It is the synergistic blending, shaping, and molding of photographic images into something else that montage and collage seems to be all about.  For my final project in this class I used a scanner as the only photographic input device and I liked that I didn’t have to break out my regular camera gear.  Staying away from my camera also opened up more creativity as I didn’t feel I was locked into a certain workflow or routine.

The pedagogy of this class follows many of the other studio classes at AAU.  You learn an overview of the subject, then you work through a variety of exercises to hone technical proficiency which takes you to the mid-term.  The for the remainder of the class you work on a project which merges the classroom teaching and your personal artistic vision as developed within the subject.

This class emphasized that one’s art is very personal and if you are true to working on things important to you the works speak with more power and personality.  That’s an important lesson to learn and it happened to occur in this class.

Things I would change or improve about the course:

Often a citation from a larger work is cited in a lesson and the larger full citation isn’t made available.  I don’t like that practice as it is so easy to misinterpret what the cited author was really trying to say.  I would like to see much more supplemental reading in this class.

One of Katrin Eismann’s books is considered required in this class yet it is rarely referred to in instruction and reading.  What a shame as her books on Photoshop techniques are some of the best on the bookshelf.  I’d like to see more exercises done pass/fail based on various chapters and section in her book.  I think a lot learning could come from refreshing and learning new Photoshop skills.

Essentially, I am asking for more work!