For my first unit project I chose to create a self portrait and collage. This piece to me is about growing up. My inspiration for this piece was that I just turned 17. This piece is a way to look back at the stages of growing up. I chose to make a collage because recently I've been really into making collages. I think college is a great medium for a piece about my life. It's a way to combine what it was like at that stage of life with images and phrases that remind you of what it was like at that age. This is a collage of my life so far. It starts at the bottom in around toddler years and goes up to my age now, 17. I intend the audience to go on this short journey with me, or if they can relate to remember these ages for themselves. I want this piece to be a way to highlight the trends and phases one goes through and the phrases one hears. My intention is for people to see the stages of growing up in my own life and to see them all laid out chronologically. This is not a representation of the feeling of growing up. It's purely nostalgia.

Originally I wanted to break up the stages of growing up into four separate collages and drawings. Once I decided to create one larger collage and then needed to decide if I wanted it to be more general or specific to me growing up. I knew I wanted to add a drawing element so the decision was pretty easy once I decided to add a self portrait. There are still some general phrases or images that many people can relate to in this piece but overall most of the images or phrases you will see are specific to my life or things that remind me of being at a certain age. Another decision I had to make was if I wanted to fill-in the full background With images and phrases. Or if I wanted to leave some free space. Ultimately I decided that it would be too crowded and hectic to look at if everything was filled in so the background is newspaper print.

If I were to do this again one thing I would change is that I would be more particular about when and where I place things. I started gluing my college before I had everything cut out which meant the spacing of certain things is a bit off. Overall I’m really happy with how this piece turned out and I wouldn’t change much about it.

The main things I learned from this project were the importance of planning, the importance of good documentation of your work and for drawing patience and knowing the final product will look different than how it does while you’re working on it. There were many times during this process when I thought this piece looked very strange or not how I imagined it. However I’m very happy with the end result. Often times the process is going to look very different than the final product and we just have to wait for it to all come together and I really think it did in this piece