Jennell Thomas Project 3: Texture/Value Mashup

In project three I examined and explored the significance of texture and value in design through the creation of a texture collage in Adobe Photoshop. I began to familiarize myself with texture and collages by reading the Ellen Lupton chapter on texture as well doing independent research on different style collages. In the “Discover” phase of the project I took photos of textured objects in the narrow and broad ranges of light and dark. Some of the things I captured included a seashell, crocodile leather boots, a crumpled plastic bag, and even my braids. With this I realized that just about everything has some type of texture even if it is not outright obvious. In the “Define” phase I created an achromatic, without color, value scale starting with two steps and ending with nine. For each set I started with the darkest, or the black step first and then gradually made each preceding step lighter, this allowed me to more accurately create my graduation and to identify value. 

In the first part of the “Develop” stage I had to use the photos that I captured in the first phase to construct my collage showing contrast with the different textures and gradation with the variety of values. Considering that this was my first major project using Adobe Photoshop I did have some difficulties in the beginning but thankfully I was able to understand the functions of the software very quickly. The trickiest part for me was dealing with the different layers, I had almost 30 layers to work with but I enjoyed myself and definitely would like to make more collages in the future. In the second part of this phase I created two sheets of texture, one using the rubbing technique on tracing paper and the other hand drawn on sketch paper. Creating the rubbings was eye opening as I had to look around me for things that had texture, some of the things I found and used were a leaf, staples, a camera strap, and a cloth. At first I thought the hand drawn textures would be easy but I actually had a hard time deciding on how I would approach each, I really had to work with contrast here.

This project taught me about the visual functions of value in conjunction with texture. From looking at my peers’ collages and my own I can see the importance that texture has, it can create moods, movement, and change. I was able to feel the weight of the textures in the collages  as well, this was dependent on the juxtaposition and value contrast. In the future I would like to work on developing my hand drawn texture skills a lot more for future works that I produce.