This was my last remaining hobby during the worst part of the pandemic lockdowns and my “rock bottom” phase. I subsequently developed an interest in image editing and photo manipulation/enhancement.

I’m not actively pursuing another income source, so I had the luxury of learning things at my own pace, driven by my own curiosity.

Putting together these collages was a gateway into the world of image editing, a first, easy step that didn’t take much effort or talent. But it helped me reconnect to my creative outlet and that was crucial during my depression and isolation. It was a link to the outside world that gave a shred of hope that things would someday return to normal.

My friend ran a IG account dedication to all things fashion and beauty related. She would often ask me to make a collage based on a theme, (usually rather vague, for example “clubbing in Ibiza” and I would try to capture that vibe by putting together an outfit with images I found on Google or had already saved of my phone. She would sometimes provide an image of one particular item and ask me to build an outfit around that. Sometimes there were more specific demands such as “must include Gucci/Chanel/etc bag or X number of items from X brand, and so on and so forth. I found it fun and never asked for any compensation. My name wasn’t even mentioned in the posts or anywhere on the account, as per my request. I’m pretty certain the individual images are already protected by copyright, so it’s not like I have any right to anything, even if I wanted it.

Anyway, her posts started getting more and more political, which generated a bit of controversy… but unfortunately not the surge in followers she was hoping for. I stopped creating content for her because I wanted no part in that hot mess. Eventually she lost a lot of followers and ended up deleting everything. Thankfully, I always saved whatever I made and I still have a lot more where these came from. Most of them are unfinished collages or just random images. I’ve recently started reorganizing them and thought I’d share a few.