Many of you may wonder what is a digital collage and how is it regarded as an art medium, EMERGEAST's Bianca Castro gives us the low down…

Digital collage, in its form, is not new to the art scene. It uses the same production technique used in making a conventional hand-made collage, which is creating a whole new artwork from an assemblage of existing artistic materials.

Collage making dates back to the early years of twentieth century with Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque being the first ones to use the cut-and-paste technique. They coined the word “collage”, which translates to the French verb “coller” meaning “to glue”.

Furthermore, collage became an intersection of both high and low culture, as it also brought newspapers, advertisements and magazines into play. Collage artists put together the images to communicate a complex message en masse. American artist Robert Motherwell described it to be “the twentieth century's greatest innovation.”

Digital collage, however, transcends the limits of manual hand-cutting and pasting. Contemporary artists manipulate the samples of existing artworks and assemble the images digitally with the use of particular computer programs, such as Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator, as an essential of the production process.

The technologically advanced generation provides an area of work that has endless possibilities for today’s artists. What with today’s easy access to plethora of materials, digital collage artists are able to engage with an abundance of existing resources that can be found online. This makes for incredible diversity and breadth in the art production, offering them with a huge range of artistic possibilities and a more connected global environment!