Bombs Away (2023) - Printed magazine and presentation paper on poster board, 11” x 14”.

Attacked from the sea, it’s the last place she expected. Looking up, we see the militaristic coordination in which the attack comes - wave after wave of bombardment. She looks away because if she doesn’t look, they don’t exist. She creates a safe space, wearing armor and surrounding herself by the things that bring her joy. In this place, created in her mind, the bombs have no power.

Doing paper collages isn’t something I would say I’ve always wanted to do. However, whenever I scroll through social media, it obviously pushes other artists’ stories and reels to me. Derek Gores is an artist I’ve been watching for a couple of years now. Shamefully, I have not purchased any of his work. I just admire from afar, I suppose. Anyway, he does some different genres/methods of art - one of them being collages. What he does is create images of people and/or items out of magazine clippings. Rather than putting items themselves on a page, as I do, he makes everything from scratch. So, rather than pasting an eye where an eye would go, he makes an eye out of multiple cuts of paper. Eventually, creating absolutely fantastic works when applied to a much bigger subject.

Here’s a screenshot of his Instagram page. Check it out here.

After following his IG and seeing his work for a bit, it started putting ideas in my mind. I got the ideas to take images of models I’ve shot before and turn them into collage pieces in various color and subject themes! Bombs Away was my first attempt.

It started with a subject. I chose my dear friend, Nikki, as the first one simply because I had already created so many things with her, I was excited to make her part of the new THING.

The photo I chose was a film shot taken from our last shoot with the Rocky Horror leather jacket I had just finished painting, studding and spiking. The jacket took me 300 hours to design, paint and decorate so I wanted some good shots to have. I had it for sale for a bit, but still it hangs. I’ll make a Gallery post about it with more details.

The shot was taken from a roll of Fuji Pro 400H shot in a Bronica ETRS with Godox AD200 Pro Flash.

After making the shot selection, I moved to colors. I chose red, yellow and blue as the main colors. From there, I could edit Nikki’s film shot into the color that would coordinate well with the rest of the collage.

I loaded the shot into Photoshop and changed it into this:

This then got printed onto 8.5 x 11 presentation paper and cut out with scissors.

After this was done, I selected background slices and items that seemed “right”. FYI, the individual paper pieces of all my collages fall into 4 simple categories: subject, color, backgrounds and items.

Subjects are selected and made at the time of creating a new collage only. Colors are solid and patterned color swatches in the entire color spectrum. Backgrounds are self-explanatory. They never make up an entire backround - just parts of them. Items refers to anything “shiny” I want in the collages. I chose to source from fashion magazines, because there’s shoes, purses, makeup, watches, glasses, you-name-it, in there. After many hours cutting and clipping Vogue and Vanity Fair (among others) I had a nice supply of colors, backgrounds and items.

Then it was just a matter of playing around with placement and items until things took shape.

I split the upper left from the lower right with blue and yellow, placing Nikki in the yellow, in contrast to the yellow.

Here, there is nothing glued down, so I was able to move things around freely. But it was here that I started to get an idea for planes and bombs. So I made them from images on the web and edited them in Photoshop. Then I made multiples in different sizes and printed them out.

…and the “bombs”:

After I was happy with placing the background, I glued it down with glue stick.

Once I had reached this point, I had a lot of tedious cutting work to do on planes, bombs, and items, so I didn’t take any more shots of the creation process until I was nearly ready to glue everything down to the background.

The first thing I do after gluing the last of the pieces is digitize the collage to create the digital masters before framing. This is done with my DSLR on a tripod. I remotely control it through my phone via Nikon’s Snap Bridge application since I do longer exposures for digital masters, shooting at F8. The RAW image was shot with a Nikon 50mm 1.8G at F8, 1 second, ISO 100.

After importing and basic color correction through a “grey card” (a sharpie marker no longer in frame) and other quick slider adjustments, I had the final digital shot.

I would be lying if I said I had this entire image planned from the very beginning. I didn’t. All I had was a basic idea of what I wanted to play around with and a color scheme. With enough playing around, more ideas came and this is what I ended up with.

As with all my collages, they have a fashion-y pop vibe and include the elements you’ll see in every collage: purses, shoes, etc.

Fun fact: This is the only collage that I have made that doesn’t have a heart somewhere in it. I include at least one heart in every collage I do after this one.

Bombs Away was an absolute joy to create. As with all of my collages, I don’t really know exactly how it is going to look until it’s finished. The decisions happen as they happen. The younger, overthinker in me freaks out at this idea. But it’s something I’ve come to love about the creative process. It’s never set in stone or executed exactly the same every time. It’s fluid and unpredictable. Fighting it for control only makes it worse. So I just follow Frankie’s advice and RELAX. ^_^