Collaging Your Identity

     Collaging: my favorite activity so far in Creative Arts Class!  The whole classroom was covered in supplies- glue, tape, paint, buckets of water, magazines and old photos, basically anything you can think of!  We had been given the assignment of making a collage of our identity.  This was a hard topic for me, I'm only a freshman, how I am I supposed to know my identity?
     Since I couldn't think of what to do, I looked up identity poems online and wrote them down on a paper, along with some lyrics from my favorite songs.  This became my background, after I drowned it in water and paint.  Then, I started gathering things from my house: old baby pictures, toys from my childhood, even some things that I had drawn a few months before (most likely while watching T.V.)
     I made sure to have an item that represented everyone important in my life: my family, my friends, and of course my wonderful golden retriever.  I had a letter from a friend, a toy snake I had found with a different friend, pellets from my brothers air-soft gun, and foam from a jewelry box.  Then I began mashing everything together on the piece of cardboard that was the base of my collage.
   
     To explain the buckets of water mentioned in the first paragraph, I must explain the concept of a packing tape transfer. To make a picture see through (like the one of the baby in the top left corner of my collage) we put tape over the picture, rubbed it down with the back of a pair of scissors, and left the taped picture in a bucket of water.  After waiting for some time, when the pictures were taken out of the water, the paper would rub off the tape, but the image would stay imprinted into the tape, making it transparent.

     My favorite part of my collage is the picture of me as a baby, looking out the window next to the front door of my old house.  The other part of my collage I like is the eye, which is supposed to be Taylor Swift's eye.  Taylor Swift is my favorite music artist, this blog is even named for one of Taylor Swift's songs!
     Making my collage helped me figure out my identity.  What I realized is that the person who I am is still evolving, and that I don't have a true identity yet.  I think my collage shows that I'm still looking for my identity, lots of random things are sort of stuck together, but in a way that works.  That's how I feel like my identity is now: crazy random things all put together to make one person!