Digital Artist Write-Up

The theme of my montage is Destruction of the Environment. I have chosen this theme because it is the most prominent issue in the world today and therefore it is a very important issue to me personally. I took a trip to New Zealand last year where I got hundreds of pictures of lush, green nature at its best. The natural environment of New Zealand, and the pictures I took there are what inspired this piece of work. After seeing how beautiful our earth is and how fragile it is I realized how terrible deforestation and similar issues are. The trees, leafs, and greenery are meant to symbolize the fragile, yet beautiful state of nature we have around the world today. And the pollution ridden, dead landscape on the right is meant to symbolize what our environment can become if we aren’t careful. The backbone of my montage is a picture of a beautiful rock canvas overlooking the open see that I took one day while strolling down a beach. The bottom is a surreal example of what could happen to our earth in an evolutionary form: it starts with a flourishing forest which then flows into a dark, dead marshy environment which then turns into a completely lifeless, dried-out desert.

The two outstanding elements of design I used in my montage were texture and shape. A shape is a self contained defined area of geometric or organic form. The rocks jutting out of the sides and bottom of the piece create positive shapes surrounding the piece. The positive shape on both sides and bottom of the picture plane create negative space in the middle: the blue skies and ocean. Texture is the surface quality of a shape - rough, smooth, soft hard glossy etc. The rocks on either side create a strong visual texture that protrudes through all the images that lie on top of it. The clouds in the background also create visual texture that appears to float through the mountain/tire pile.