So I began this photo montage with an archival photograph which I believe depicted trade within Jersey, It is an image of a veterinary surgery taken by Francis Foot.
I then cropped the original image down so that the boarder remained with some of the tarnished edges.
I then wanted to cover the building in the image using a photograph of a high contrast with a simple 2 colour scheme, as I believed this would give a graffiti-Esq aesthetic. So I chose this image above of a postcard of a banana farm in Madeira. This imagery would then depict the link between Jersey and the Mediterranean in terms of trade in the food industries.
Then using double exposures and blending modes I began to fix the postcard image to the archival image.
Here is how I set the blending options in Photoshop, using the ‘Hard Light’ blend mode, setting the top layer at 0/136 and the underlying layer at 104/255. This causes the top layer to lay almost perfectly within the light tones of the underlying layer.
Here above is how the layers set together using the blending options which I explained. I was satisfied with how this had turned out as the aesthetic which I was going for with the bold tones had worked effectively.
However as I said before the layers sit ”almost perfectly” but there were certain parts of the image that once scaled up didn’t look quite right. I therefore began to go round sections of the building such as window frames, the roof and where the building meets the street, rubbing out the imperfections of where the top layer overlapped too much.
As you can see here I just simply used the rubber tool in Photoshop to get rid of the sections i wasn’t happy with.
Once I was satisfied with how the first two layers came together, I thought that the piece was still lacking another element, and i was immediately drawn to the empty space left by the sky which I thought could be filled nicely by an image which incorporated a blue cloudy sky and maybe some form of a modern structure. I then looked through the postcard shoot which I did and found this image of what appears to be an army or security base, it fitted the kind of photo which I was looking to add to the piece.
In the same way as I did with the second layer I blended the army base photograph into the sky of the image so far. again I used the ‘Hard Light’ blend mode, setting the top layer at 0/136 and the underlying layer at 104/255.
However the same as with the first part of blending I did there were slight imperfections from where the image overlapped the roof of the building and the chimney as well. So again as I did before I used the eraser tool to remove any of these imperfections.
After this whole process I was very satisfied with how the piece looked and rather than adding any more elements which could over complicate the image i decided to leave it as it was. I believe that this image was very aesthetically successful as the composition is simple yet interesting with elements of chaos. Context-wise I also believe it is very successful as it subtly shows links between Jersey and the rest of the world which is what I was aiming for. I believe that this piece is successful enough to safely say that I can use it as one of my final pieces.
