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" I'd been designing album covers on MS Paint since I was around 10 years old, making designs for bands I liked and my own compilation CD's I'd put together. I was really into graphic design on the computer because my drawing skills were terrible - and still are. After having a gamble at college with a Graphic Art course I began to mess around with textures and Photoshop. Here began my journey into being able to apply my artistic mind without having to draw. This then led onto me taking my art foundation course which introduced me to a host of things, but analogue collage really stuck with me.
City Blues
Follow the Leader
Although I loved collaging by hand, I started to realise its limitations and began combining my hands on skills with my digital ones. Since then I have been challenging myself to explore the medium as much as I can, from building installations to street art to animation. Six years on from my foundation, I'm still exploring the medium.
I began to have an obsession with collecting old books as resources from charity shops and bookshops, ones that have been forgotten about that I could bring back to life. I find textures interesting and the combination of these two aspects excited me. Each collage brings images together to create something absurd, a unique creation. Dreams fascinate me - I find collages are almost dream-like in how surreal they can become from just combining multiple images in different compositions.
Drones
The process changes as I develop, however I mainly stick to this routine: creating a texture; finding scenery, characters and objects, and then trying to challenge each section by playing with scale, colour and cutting them up. It's good to find imagery you feel you can really work with, something that fabricates ideas.
GIFs make an image momentarily come to life for a few seconds. A collage already brings imagery, which may have been long forgotten about, back into existence. To then give it movement and breathe life into it hypnotises me.
Grassroots creativity can be an important means to speak out against corporations. An image can portray a message in ways words can't. Collage mainly originated from its political agenda during Dadaism, a movement which had a big influence on me, inspiring some of my works such as 'Follow the Leader' in my contemporary collage politics series. Illustration can be great tool for activism, culture jamming, zines, wheatpasting and so on. Grassroots creativity helps express individuality so we don't all get sucked into doing that 9-5 job."
Rob is a 25 year old from London. Check out more of his work here.