Collage on Photoshop

My first digital media lecture consisted of a teaching of new techniques on photoshop that will be hopefully used in our later projects. The lecturer mainly focused on combining different images onto one picture, hence a collage. I therefore decided to use a specific theme, Africa. The reason being that I have lived there my whole life and has an impact on me as an individual. I chose all the different images on google as there was a great variety of African scenes. After I finalised my choice of images I began with the concrete background, the African continent and brushed the outskirts of the shape in red, orange and yellow as this is the base of my project. The bright colours as well as its position of the image would catch the audiences' eye. When this was completed, I created other layers to edit the other images on its own. I tended to use the same tools to edit the images, cropping the picture, erasing the edging to emphasise the reality of the picture as well as changing the lighting of the image. I personally found this difficult to do for the first couple of times, being my first time using photoshop. Although it did get easier, it felt more of a routine. I combined the images using a certain method as I wanted to achieve a correlation between the images for an example, Kilimanjaro at the top of the image, grass on the bottom as it would appear more logical. The denotation of this collage is noticeably a collection of different African scenes yet the connotation of this picture is a representation of the nature of the continent. I believe that this collage does reflect this connotation and this was successfully done with the use of the tools on photoshop that I will most likely utilise in the future.