For this project, I wanted to display to people how the idea that thrifting is “too much work” and “dirty” is often not true. I chose to include images that contained purely thrifted pieces of clothing (excluding shoes), and all of the images except one that I used, I took myself. The other photo comes from a local vendor in my hometown, Spokane. I’ve bought many of my favorite pieces from him, including the sweatshirt that I pictured in the top left corner, which reads, “I could enjoy the day more if it started later.”
To begin, I started by going through my camera roll and finding any pictures I had that showed off thrifted clothes. These included pictures of myself in my favorite thrifted corduroy cardigan, a picture of my sister stunting a completely thrifted eighties look, and a picture of my sister’s friend wearing a nifty outfit, which includes a pair of jeans she bought at Goodwill and then decorated with a variety of iron-on patches she had been collecting for a few years.
After I had all of the photos of the clothing, I felt that something major was missing. I didn’t just want to title the collage “Clothes I’ve Thrifted” because I wanted to add to my theme of photos I had taken that matched the retro/thrifting concept. I then remembered this one time that I took a picture of a super cool sign in my favorite vintage store. “5 Reasons to Buy Vintage Clothing,” it read. In my first draft of this project, I still decided to mask the pocket of the jeans with the sign, but not all of the words were readable. This time around, I decided to make it so the viewer could read the whole poster, and I also decided to get rid of the cutouts of people on the pocket altogether. Instead, I kept the original pictures and arranged them all over the jeans, masking them and lowering the opacity. I did this because many of my peers commented that the cutouts I originally had were too small and you couldn’t even see the thrifted outfits.
Along with fixing the sign within the pocket and changing the cutouts to edited versions of the original photos, I also decided to use the burn tool on the sky to darken the background, and the dodge tool on the sweatshirt and seams of the pocket to make the main points appear brighter.
Overall, I feel that this version of my draft improved drastically since my last draft. I know that there is always more than can be done to improve my work, but I feel like this is a very good start to something I can use in the future. Although at times I was frustrated that I forgot how to do something or it wasn’t looking exactly how I wanted it, since I kept on practicing and actually cared to figure out how to do things the right way, I now feel more confident in my editing skills. By masking different layers, changing the opacity, and positioning and changing the colors of photos differently, I feel that I adhered to the suggestions of my peers and improved my projected hugely.
Below, I have linked the instagram of Jack Sabbath, who kindly allowed me to borrow his photo of his rack of clothing inside Chosen Vintage.
Marley McAllister 