RE-COLLAGE

Having had the initial collage approved there remained some work to do to have it fit better onto the OLIO page size. The main consideration was wanting my man leaving university to be stepping out of one page and onto the other; when the initial collage was put into inDesign he was well over on the left page as the 'post uni' scene was dominant. This meant re-collaging to make an entirely new left panel. I wanted also to remove Jonathan Cooper's drawing as it seemed to clash with the rest of the piece and was fairly unsubtly integrated. I found it hard to enter quite into the same spirit of the piece as the rest had been done a good two weeks earlier. Nonetheless, scavenging through my bits folder I produced this:

New elements included some students moaning about job opportunities outside the building (this was collaged from print outs of the Mark Fisher essay Capitalist Realism), a new university sign from yellow paper, a life-drawing scene (using a life class advert from an art magazine) and various bits copied and re-collaged from the original image.

(n.b. parts of this at the bottom and top are missing due to not being able to find the original scans - it had to be pieced together from several scans at it is larger than A3. This wasn't an issue when making the final image as I did other scans at the time)

This was then able to slot alongside my unadulterated right-hand page to produce this:

This required a good bit of pushing and pulling, stretching and re-collaging on photoshop to fill the OLIO frame. I was working from about 6-7 different scans due to the fact that the image was in two parts and needed to be scanned in in various different ways to get all the information (it was on card, so could't be put through the big FCH scanner). This was, in short, a bit of a nightmare. It perhaps highlights the ideal method of producing a piece in the correct size initially.

In the end, I probably spent longer on the computers tinkering to line the thing up correctly and scale it etc than I did producing the initial collage. I shall avoid this in future. Anyhow, I wasn't displeased with the final outcome. Not that it was quite the final outcome, as we shall see.