Me and Umar’s end product is a race car driving through the mountains at sunset. We had lots of different iterations before we arrived here. We initially wanted to do a race car, but were thinking of having a race track in the foreground, and have a city landscape in the back, similar to an F1 race. However, this was not easily feasible. We drew inspiration from Cars, and tried using a picture from Radiator Springs. However, the nodes were not clearly showing a race track nor the iconic rock structure.
From there, we pivoted to real life. We tried having the background be the skyline of Tokyo. However, even with a fairly simple silhouette, Sangala wouldn’t trace it properly. At this point we pivoted to nature. We also moved the car to be the foreground, instead of a race track. We put mountains in the back, and put a skyline, having some clouds and the sun. We traced the mountain, which was easier than finding a simple and usable image that would work on Sangala. We also added a dust cloud to show how fast the car was going.
We have been finding images online. The car was a race car outline, and the sun and clouds were clip arts that we put into Sangala. We are now left with a race car driving down the mountains at sunset, which is far from where we initially planned. However, we are happy with our current results and look forward to seeing what it becomes!
This is so cool–You opened up a world of possibilities for me, thinking about how AI can disaggregate the images for us. I tried to use your promt to recreate my own image–and while I don’t like it as much as my own, I feel like I could have some fun with it, I am pasting my ChatGPT image so you can see the difference.
I wanted to share a bit of the process behind this piece! Willimiah and I worked on this one together through Sangala Studio, using AI prompting to generate and separate out the individual image elements (the panda, bamboo, blossoms, mountains) before combining them into the final composition.
We landed on a red panda as the centerpiece almost immediately (honestly, just because of how unbearably cute they are). From there, we started building out the world around it. A bamboo forest felt like the obvious setting, and we loved the idea of scattering cherry blossoms through the stalks to soften the scene and add a pop of color against all that green.
For the background, we wanted layered mountain scenery to sit behind everything, partly for depth, but mostly because we wanted to nod to the natural habitat red pandas actually come from in the wild. It felt important to ground the design in something a little more authentic rather than just a flat backdrop.
Really happy with how it turned out and please let us know what you think!
Hello again! Here is our finished collage. All went rather smoothly with die cutting and assembling (minus some smeared glue), and we pressed the glued collage between two thick pieces of rubber cutting boards to achieve a flat final product. The picture was taken using the photo booth in the classroom across the hall from ours, and allowed for a very clear, almost PDF-scanned looking image. A few notes from our experience that you may benefit from:
Only use full or nearly full sheets of paper in the die cutter, especially when using a worn rubber mat underneath, otherwise the paper will end up slipping and not cutting your desire shape.
For our more basic shapes, we opted to cut by hand rather than using the die cutter, as we found that to be more efficient and were able to make small changes without refiguring our designs in Sangala.
Try to not place images within a 1-inch(ish) boarder on your Sangala design sheet, as the die cutter may have trouble picking up your image.
Play around with colors! Obviously not all of the colors used in your digital collage will be available to you when assembling your physical iteration, so keep that in mind when creating your drafts and be open to different hues, shades, or entirely different colors in your physical collage.
Here is our finished collage! Overall, we are happy with how it came out, but have a few lessons learned to share:
If there are any layered background elements (we had several layers of hills/shrubs), give yourself some buffer so you don’t have to get the alignment perfect right! I would just add a rectangle to the bottom of the element in Sangala.
We printed out two of every element in our collage, figuring that we could either make two collages or have a backup in case we messed something up. Having two of each element solved our alignment issues mentioned earlier, as we could cover up gaps with the extra copy. That fix created a really cool layered effect in our final product.
We ran into some issues with shapes that went all the way across our page, it seems as if the die cutter is not able to cut past a certain point. For cuts that went all the way across our page, we oriented our parts vertically in Sangala.
I began by sourcing a reference photograph online of a buffalo standing beside a bird, which served as the visual foundation for the piece. To simplify the image into a shape I could work with for cutting, I imported the photo into Google Gemini and prompted it to generate a cartoonized, black-and-white version of the buffalo and bird. I refined the prompt several times, adjusting the wording based on each result, until I arrived at an output with enough detail (like the horns, ear, and eye) to make an interesting die-cut.
I then sourced additional reference images online for the rest of the scene: rolling hills, ground texture with pebbles and debris, tufts of grass in varying shapes and shades, a mountain silhouette, a rippling water pattern, and an acacia-style tree.
Once I had all my reference images gathered, I imported them into Sangala Studio, where I traced each subject individually using the software’s background removal tool to isolate clean outlines. Each traced shape was then sent to the die cutter and cut out of different colors of cardstock — purple for the trees, tan and brown for the hills and ground, green for the grass tufts, gray for the buffalo, teal for the water, and white for the egret.
Finally, I assembled the collage by layering and gluing the individual cardstock pieces onto a white cardstock background, building the scene from back to front — sky, trees, hills, grass, ground, and water — before placing the buffalo and bird in the foreground.
This is our printed out copy. We followed our draft pretty similarly. We changed some shades of the mountain based on the paper that we had. We also got rid of the browns in the skyline and replaced with reds and oranges to keep up with the sunset. We added snowcaps to the mountain peaks, and added some lines on the mountains to add depth and show the separate parts of the mountain, attempting to make the image more realistic. Overall, we were able to implement the plan very well, and are left with a finished product we are happy with.
We started the fabrication process with one of us starting from the topmost layer and the other starting from the bottom. After organizing and printing each layer, we worked together to accurately match the layers to the Sangala Studio rendition. Once we took a picture, we glued it together as closely as we could.
What worked well was splitting the workload to be as efficient as possible. We also both really enjoyed the design we were creating, even if it led to a bit more planning than we first thought. For example, we added the sun in the background to complement the dragon. Originally, we wanted lines surrounding the monster but ran into too many technical difficulties.
While gluing, we noticed that there were small pieces of white space due to inaccuracy. We thought that minuscule adjustments for the wave layers wouldn’t matter, but the whitespace was really noticeable. So we had to reglue a few times. Additionally, we purposefully cut a few pieces larger than the background paper. So our last step was cutting the edges of the paper to fit on the page.
GIRAFFE IN THE WILDERNESS
Precious and Emma
We were able to come up with our collage of a giraffe in the wilderness. We first downloaded the images we were supposed to use from Google and we opened them up in the Sangala Studio.
As we opened them in sangala studio we hard to first take off the background of each image at a time using the background remover tool. We then added colors to them which were green for the grass , gray for the giraffe , harsh gray for the tress , yellow for the sun and orange for the background which is the sky when the sun is setting
We started by downloading our images from google and saved them. We then later opened up the Sangala Studio and then we imported the images.
Then we later introduced the background remover tool to provide a silhouette of our images one at a time and gave them different colors forming a soft copy of our work.
After that we had to make a hard copy of our work and that was done by cutting out our images using a dicutter one image at a time, then we glued them together (elephant, tree, sun, calf and the grass) on a blue back ground showing the blue sky.
TINDIYA AND ELVIS
AN AEROPLANE FLYING ABOVE THE MOUNTAIN
Titus and Elvis drew an aeroplane flying above the mountain. First, we started drawing a mountain with which we designed with a green color to emphasize nature. Then we drew the plane above the mountain descending above the clouds. On the side view of the mountain, we drew some two birds flying over to represent wildlife ecosystem, then on the left view of our work, we drew the most abundant source, which is the sun, but while drawing the sun. It was exceedingly difficult for us to come up with the clear outfit of the shape that we planned to make, and this has eroded experience onto our fingertips. Furthermore, we also drew the clouds above the sky which were painted white to showcase the natural outlook of the sky with its blue background painted with light blue.
These are the challenges that we faced during the drawing, it was particularly challenging on our side to select the most appropriate color that would be used on our background.
We started by searching for the pictures of the pictures of the animals online, then we downloaded the pictures and then we saved it to the file manager. After that we opened them in Sangala studio. We then converted the images to silhouette and then gave them different colors. Then we went back to search for grass and a mountain but that is when we found difficulties.
The difficulties were changing the grass to silhouette. Most of the grass could not change but finally we found the one which changed.
Another was that the mountain was too big so we had to crop the mountain to make it smaller to fit in the page. Then as we went back to search for the sun and we did not save, so we lost the work and we had to repeat all this again. This made me (Prudence) and Bright to learn that when ever we make a good change we need to save it before we do / open another page. And when we followed this step, we came out with the project above. Thank you.
We came up with the idea of a sunset and decided which animal would be the main subject of our collage. we decided on the elephant to be at the riverside. we also wished that we have some plantations among which the elephant would be, so we decided to include palm trees which the elephants are so much familiar with.
We began by drawing the river with the pen tool. you can notice that the edges are very straight, as we couldn’t find a river to bring out the impression we wanted from the web. We then included a sun from the shapes in sangala studio and got a bit of difficulties trying to make the sun have sun spikes and appear realistic. We went ahead to draw the hills between which our river was to flow and gave it the colour of our African soil. We added plants and this is where we also had a challenge of finding the right grass that would fit perfectly in our collage on the riverside, so we just used the pen tool to come up with that. The final piece of our collage came just right in as we found the side profile of the elephant that we had planned to put in the collage.
It was not a cup of tea during the design process, but this was not bad for the start. we knew we could do better with time.
This image is a safari scene. The main object is giraffe because of all the animals in Ugandan wild life is a giraffe because it is noticed easily. this is due to its elongated but elegant neck.
we used different colors of cardstock although we had initially wanted most of the images to be black.it was a challenge because we were out of black card stock .another challenge we faced getting the right proportions for our images.
despite this challenges, our colleagues in the design class were able to help us out. we had a lot of fun thinking what image to do because it remained us of the tours we had to national park
I created a collage of a swimmer in the sunset. In order to create this image, I thought about my favorite sport, which is swimming. I then found a picture of a swimmer online and pasted it into Sangala Studio. I was having trouble with making sure the edges were correct, so I went to ChatGPT, and it helped to develop my picture a little further. I did review Joe and Dylan’s ChatGPT conversation and used that as a reference in order to help find the images needed to put into Sangala Studio.
My design process included a lot of patience. I created the image I originally wanted with the help of ChatGPT and then made edits along the way by changing the nodes in Sangala Studio. I feel like by changing the nodes I was able to develop a picture that was more personal and a little bit more complex. I also found that I had to spend some time getting adjusted to the tools in Sangala Studio. After a couple of hours playing around with the tools, I was successful in developing the collage that is above.
I decided to use the different waves to show different shades of blue water. I thought this would add a cool flare to the image. The orange and blue lanes were added to kind of give the swimming pool “effect” so that someone would know it’s a swimmer as soon as they look at the image. The flags at the top are pretty symbolic to me. I always will remember the first swimming flags I swam under when I learned how to do backstroke, so I thought by adding them I could reflect on a personal memory.
The artistic goal was to create something that reflects on a childhood memory. I wanted to develop something that had a lot of color and also could show that I had put a lot of thought into it. Overall, I am happy with the product I was able to produce.
SIISA PRECIOUS AND KULOBA EMMA
GIRAFFE IN THE WILDERNESS SHADOW BOX.
We were able to come up with our shadow box of a giraffe in the wilderness using the sangala studio.
First we had to get the shapes we needed to use for making the frame and the windows. Then we inserted the silhouette of the images that we needed that is the giraffe, grass, tree and the sun. We then cut out the images using a die cutter one at a time and joined them together using staple wires. We found difficulties in cutting out our images like the giraffe since the cardstock paper was too hard but we solved it by cutting it twice.
