Identity Collage

My identity collage includes penguins, the Mexican flag, books, my pet cat, anime characters, favorite bands, my interest, and what I enjoy. The penguins represent my identity by showing my love for cold weather, and because they tend to be aggressive yet gentle, outgoing but shy, and stable yet flighty, it shows that they only reveal the side they want you to see. This relates to me since I often make fake smiles. Additionally, I included the shattered glass pattern to represent how much I know myself. I could have gone with puzzle pieces, but they're easy to put back together unlike glass since when they break, they shatter into many shards; each being a unique shape and size, which makes it harder to put back together. The difficulty level of putting the glass back together represents how it's hard for me to figure out what I want to do in life and how hard it is for me to express my feelings.

The process of making my collage included using the refine edge feature, the clipping mask feature, the magic wand feature, and the erasure feature from photopea. I found the process to be hard because, for my first idea, I was going to use wings instead of the glass pattern and put the images in the wings, but non of the wings I used looked good, so I had to scrap that Idea. My second idea of using the shattered glass came to me while I was looking for wings to use. It was hard to use the magic wand on the glass pattern since it resulted in the glass looking a bit faded around the edges and when I did find a good image to use since it was black and white, it looked too pixelated, so I had to restart from scratch and look for a new image of glass to use. I ended up using one that was real instead of the 2d art and using the magic wand on that was way harder that I ended up using the refine edge feature. Using that feature made it easier to remove things from the original image, but it was also time-consuming. Overall, I think that my collage wasn't a success because the images I used will confuse others in what they're supposed to represent, and also, I forgot to blend in my portrait with the collage, but in my opinion, it wouldn't look as good if I blended my portrait with it.