Famous Landmark Stencil Critique

                 

     For my landmark stencil, I picked a picture of an arch that I took on a trip to Rome, Italy. On the computer, I inserted the image into Photoshop and made it black and white, to outline the parts I would need to cut out for my stencil.To go along with my picture of an ancient Roman landmark, I decided to make the theme of my collage background "ancient civilizations." At first, I was just going to do an Ancient Rome theme, but I quickly found there wasn't going to be enough pictures and book pages, so I expanded it to an ancient civilizations theme. You probably can't tell from the picture above, but I included pictures and pages from books about the ancient Greeks and Egyptians as well. I included everything from pictures of the gods and the emperors, to famous landmarks (like the Coliseum). I even found a menu of a typical Roman diet in one of the books. After I finished gluing down all the pictures and pages, I decided to add a light shade of orange watercolor on top, for no good reason other than the fact that orange is my favorite color. After, I unwisely decided to add some blue spray-paint on top. I didn't like the way it turned out. I intended for it to be a light mist of blue to contrast with the orange, but it turned out too dark and I think it looked better without the blue spray paint.

     When I was drawing my stencil, I cut out the areas that would separate the different shapes. For example, I cut out the area around the columns and the windows so that their shape would show up on the collage once I spray painted. The negative space contrasts against the positive space to create the image of the arch and the building behind the arch. Cutting out my stencil was a tricky and somewhat frustrating process. I had an idea of what I wanted my cutout to look like, but it proved difficult once I actually started cutting. Using the xacto knife wasn't the frustrating part. When cutting out your stencil, you always have to remember to keep everything connected, which was the difficult part. There were a lot of areas that I didn't know how to connect and I ended up with a lot of very thin lines.When I had to go spray paint, I also ended up having to use tape to make up for all the skinny lines, and to tape down areas that came up and otherwise would not have shown up on the collage. I chose to spray paint my stencil black because I thought that would show up best on my orange/blue collage. First, I went over it with white spray paint, and then with the black. I also chose to spray-paint the stencil in the center of the collage because as much I loved my collage, I wanted the stencil to be the focus of attention. If I placed it anywhere else, it might have been overshadowed by the collage. At the end, I added in a mist of black spray paint around the stencil to dilute the collage and bring more attention to the stencil.