Add Texture and Final Touches
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The final stage is where I make sure I have all of the pictures I want integrated in the collage. I made a few last minute additions here. I also play with some textures to add consistency to the piece and give it an overall effect and vibe. This just ties the piece together. I added some texture around the edges to give it the appearance of torn paper; this is just a stylistic choice by me and kind of a homage to classic collaging. Once this is all done, the collage can be considered a finished product and I am satisfied with the results.
Start Layering
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I continue to add more photos and more abstract colour variations from scratch using Photoshop. This is also where I will start to manipulate the colours I integrated to where I think they look cool; this is done using multiple filters and distortions within Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. This is really just a lot of trying out different techniques and figuring out things that are to your personal preference. Explore your software and try out random stuff; you never know what you might discover. This stage is pretty important because I’m making sure everything is starting to be where I want it to be as the piece comes together.
Add Color
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This is the stage where I start splashing some colors around the piece to later mess around with. It’s fun to play around with color and see what kind of themes or combinations you can come up with. Certain combinations can evoke different moods. You might even find that you have a particular color scheme that will kind of become your signature. This is where you can diversify and lead your own aesthetic or style within your own collage; always try to take things one step further! Because this piece is all about friends and inspirational people, I went with some nice, inspiring and bright colors. In this stage I also decided to go back and actually add some more shots of important people to me taken by friends. While I try to do my collages in stages, sometimes I might think of different things as I go, so there’s really never a perfectly linear progression or planned piece; it’s pretty fluid.
Create a Base
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This is where you create the foundation of your piece. If you have a theme or a message you are trying to convey, you’ll want to come up with that first and then gather your images based on that. This one in particular is a tribute to my friends and also inspirational people in my life, so I started with just putting photos of friends or taken by friends of mine who are photographers; there’s also some pages from my book in there. I cut them up and place them where I think they look cool. The nice part about creating this digitally is that you have a lot of freedom to move things around a rearrange them. I’ve also placed some good shots of my city in there. Shoutout @fjilm and @junglepants for the photos.
Collage is taking on a whole new life and meaning, and artists like Math are the ones getting tapped by some of the industries biggest names to transfer new-age visions to this age-old form. He hails from Calgary, a small city in the Canadian prairies best known for its oil and beef, as well as being “dumb cold for most of the year,” according to Math. The cold climate and somewhat boring surroundings have given him a lot of time indoors to perfect his craft and over the past year or so Math has created work ranging from album art to social media imagery for an impressive roster of names including A$AP Mob’s AWGE collective, G.O.O.D. Music, Universal Music, Republic Records and more. He provides a wide variety of services including various types of digital art, but his collages are particularly captivating.
Attending an arts school for most of his formal education obviously helped with his technical skills, but—as is the case with many millenial creatives—it was the Internet that took Math’s talents to new levels: “I asked my mom when the first time she caught me drawing was; she said that I was 3. I used to look at graffiti drawing videos on YouTube and stumbled upon some “GFX” which was basically graffiti but integrated into 4D / Photoshop software. I needed to figure out how to create that sort of thing myself.” Social networking proved invaluable when it came to getting his work into the hands of those who could help launch his career: “When I first made my Twitter I pretty much just tried to make something every single day on Photoshop and just post it trying to get people to use it to get my name out there,” Math shares of the early days. “I had to DM quite a lot of people until I finally established a sort of base network to progress with. It gets easier as you go from my experience.”
Below, Math created an original piece for us and
shared how he created it, step-by-step.
Chances are we’ve all created at least one collage in our lifetime, most likely crafted from scraps of magazines or newspapers and held together with Elmer’s Glue. The medium isn’t a new one by any means—with origins tracing way back to 200 BC—but has, especially in the digital age, taken on a while new life. The collage is quite literally an artwork made from an assemblage of different forms, thus creating a new whole, and can be seen as a metaphor for the current creative landscape where the lines between fashion, art and music are more blurred than ever. In recent years, collage has become a favorite of the high-fashion set in the form of surrealist ad campaigns and eye-popping lookbooks. Meanwhile, the technique is a mainstay in the world of street art with artists like Dain and Paul Insect leading the way, while labels like Vetements have applied the deconstructed aesthetic to garments themselves.
The young artist who's worked for A$AP Mob and G.O.O.D. Music
takes us through his work.
