I make collages and word posters from vintage and retro illustrations and images in the public domain. Here's my latest piece, 'J is for Journey'.
Had a lot of fun making this one, a lot of good words that begin with J ๐
this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2023
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Lovely stuff - and, looking at all the detail, this must have taken quite a while. Are you planning to do the full alphabet?
Thank you! ๐
It does take a lot of time, but my database of finished images is growing, meaning material from related projects can be recycled more often, and I'm getting much better at organizing and finding source material as well.
I actually timed my hours working on J (not including compiling word lists and all the work on getting the print files ready) because my silent partner wanted to know if I could finish all the letters of the alphabet before christmas (it looks like I might be able to pull it off): 40 hours, spread over two weeks.
I did a single poster with the full Danish alphabet in December last year, so there was a good selection of material from that one that I was able to recycle, saving some time. The most time consuming aspect is the restoration and masking of the vintage illustrations, so having a good, searchable database of all my assets is priceless (I'm using Eagle and it's been worth every penny), and I've finally managed to import and tag them all.
This is the tenth letter in the English Letters series that I've finished. The rest of them can be seen on my Instagram. Migrating to a Pixelfed instance is on my to-do.
Reusing clips and maintaining a database sounds really wise for this kind of work. I can recall doing physical collages twice for some classes a few years back. I had a real headache from handling the gluing to finding good clips, and I didn't make an effort to save the rest of the page. I probably lost out on some good stuff there ๐คง.
Doing collages digitally sounds like so much fun to me though, and Eagle sounds like just what the doctor ordered. I tried using XYPlorer, and it's quite a robust improvement on the Windows explorer. The problem is that it seems to get tricky with cloud drive files in my experience. Eagle looks like it has a ton of potential for the kind of stuff I like to do.
The database is priceless, especially because of the ability to tag and filter files.
As I work in both Danish and English, an example of tagging for the Jackrabbit from this poster would be:
Most importantly for my use case, I have a set of special tags denoting which letters a given image can be used for in English or Danish:
So when I need to make the English H poster (which I'm currently working on), I simply search for h-en (starts with H in English), and Eagle gives me all relevant assets. I add these tags manually (as well as stuff like fauna-dk), but because Eagle indexes filenames super well, I've recently taken to just adding most of the basic info to the filenames, like this:
danish-word_english-word__tags-go-here.psd
I save everything as Photoshop PSD files, so if I make an alteration to a file for a specific project, that is saved for all future projects, but the original, unaltered version is still there as a hidden layer if I need it. Simple version control ๐
I also do a lot of analogue collage, and must admit I've yet to find a workable system for storing and sorting my materials; I feel your pain.
I definitely recommend Eagle if you think it fits your use case. Along with Obsidian (for project notes and writing), it is by far the best piece of software I've found in ages ๐