This is my final image for the environmental weekly brief. Going against my original plans, I decided to scrap the idea of a collage after failed attempts and decided to create something in Photoshop. My initial idea was to edit images of bottles into the ocean to create an ocean of bottles but it looked rather amateur and I gave up. However, I took a look at my work to see what I could do to improve it and thought, what if I put the ocean in the bottle instead? So I used the landscape image I took at Bowcombe bridge a couple months ago and found a picture of a clear bottle online and produced this outcome. I think it creates a pretty strong concept of how we live in a plastic world now. I was also inspired by the ships inside bottles you can get as that made me think about how I could put the ocean inside a bottle.
In terms of my failed collage, I tried to stick together small pictures of bottles onto the ocean at home but it got really messy very fast and it looked like a mess and so I scrapped it. I wish I had uploaded a picture of it but by the time I had realised that I should it was already thrown away. I then decided to create the same effect but in Photoshop and edited the same plastic bottle in the image above dozens of times over and over again until the entire ocean was covered. This looked even worse! That’s what got me thinking of how I could improve and brought me on to the idea of the ocean in the bottle.
To create this image was quite simple, I got the image of the bottle and rotated it so it was on its side. I then put the image of the landscape on top and lined it up so the water line was roughly in the middle. I cut out the parts of the landscape that were outside of the bottle using the polygonal lasso tool and inverse selecting once it was done. I changed the blend mode of the landscape to ‘multiply’ and the opacity to 58%. This left with the impression that the landscape was inside the bottle.
Overall, I am fairly happy with this image as it has a strong concept of us living in a world of plastic and I think it has been presented well. The only thing I wish I could have done to improve it would be to have created some kind of successful physical manipulation as I think it would have pushed my creativity a lot more which was one of my targets for this project. However, for the bigger Social Action brief I still have time to experiment and we’ll see what happens.
RACHEL ELLIOTT 