| Bridge 1: Fear and Excitement |
Title: The Black Star
Ten from a portfolio of twelve digital prints
2007
Seher Shah
In this memory montage, I wanted to show my emotions when I went to my school in Switzerland for the first time. It was difficult for me in the beginning since I didn’t speak any English and couldn’t adapt to the new environment easily. When I went to MOMA for my inspiration, I found this piece by Seher Shah which the tone of the piece can represent my emotion from my memory. The composition and the range of lines caught my eyes, so I decided to get inspiration from this piece. I first edited my photo and my drawing using Photoshop, then I collaged them and added some pattern, and colors. In this montage I used ink, pen, watercolor and prints.
My challenges were creating the silhouette of myself using Photoshop. I tried by using many layers, and trying out for few times, I managed to do it. Also the overall composition didn’t came out as I expected. I had drawn a sketch of how the piece wanted to look like, including the composition, elements, and colors. However as I was working on it, the scale was different, so it ended up in different composition. I had to figure out how to make the piece balanced. I solved by trying out different composition before putting it on to the paper. I always take picture of overall piece to see if the composition is in the right shape. This helped me to fix the composition of my montage.
I wanted to represent my memory by visualising my emotions at that time. In order to do that, I used colors and patterns to represent my emotions. In my montage, I used dark tone and sharp geometric pattern to represent my fear, and I used colors and circle dotted pattern to represent my excitement. For the circle dotted pattern, I got inspired by Japanese cartoons. They use this technique to show the emotions of their characters and circle dots represent happiness, and excitement. I chose to use this to show my identity. Also I used some repetition to show how everything looks bigger when you are afraid of something which I believe represents my fear.
