Maps and Nature vs. Mechanical

Originally, I was planning on doing the Nature vs. Mechanical project, with just like fruits that were cut open so you could see cogs and stuff inside of them? But they would be placed on a table, or in a normal setting near a fruit bowl, so you would assume that this was some sort of alternative reality where it was completely acceptable to have mechanical fruit.  I guess I was going for more of an absurdist thing.

    So, I drew out my apple and my banana--they're water color pencil--and then I drew the cogs and gears in pen, and then I painted them with water. They came out looking fantastic, and I was really proud of myself, so I started on the marbled granite of my counter using oil pastels.  Honestly, it looked terrible, and I was really disappointed. 

   

       So, I did what any normal person would do and I cut the pieces of fruit out individually.  As you can see here.  Now that I had the individual fruits, though, I needed a background to put them on.  I had already planned on doing the map project after I was finished with this one, so I decided that I would just combine the ideas.
      I had a better plan for the map project than the nature vs. mechanical project, so I continued on with that theme, which was road trip.  I know that that was a pretty stereotypical idea for a map, but I was going to do a monster road trip. So, I sort of incorporated that into this piece.
      The map that I chose was of Manhattan and the surrounding boroughs.  Ms. Rossi said that she liked the little newspaper and pen monsters I'd put in the water, so I decided to really amp it up and make the piece about monsters attacking New York City? And this was just someone's plan to get out. So, I drew escape routes directly onto the map, wrote a list of things that you would need to do if you were escaping the city, and sponged holes into the paper itself, and glued monsters coming out of it.  On top of all that, I added my banana and my apple because I thought that they fit the idea well. Sort of a steampunk atmosphere and also the color scheme went well together.
     Whenever I make collages, I'm thinking of creating more of a story that I do when I'm making another sort of art.  The combination of different objects from different locations lends itself more to storytelling for me.  So, the idea behind this is that someone is quickly leaving their home, and they have fruits that are lying on top of their map.  Fruits and a bunch of other stuff that they'll need, as well as representations of their future and what's going on around them. So the piece is a still life of a moment in time.  It's not a very cohesive idea, I know, but I love it a lot.  
     The note in the middle of the page was one that I found in the book of maps, and it's handwritten by my uncle. It's directions to somewhere, so that is the coolest piece of this collage.

This is a planning stage. 

This is probably my third or forth stage. I hadn't even glued the banana down yet, or glued down and
torn off a thing of white tissue paper.  

This is the final! 

     I don't know if you can tell, but there's a monster crawling out of the map by the banana, and then there are a bunch of cut out letters that say 'avoid water' like a ransom note in the middle. The picture on the bottom is of my mom's car with a bunch of luggage on top booking it down the highway. And the gears in the top left and bottom right corners are yellow, to keep the banana from standing out so much.  I definitely could put more stuff on top of all this, but I don't want to obscure any of these details, because I'm so attached to them (that's a problem I have with collages, I think), and I wouldn't know what else to put.