Kensuke Koike Artist Study

I decided to try and replicate Koike's collage style with my grandfather's portrait. I printed a hexagon pattern on a piece of paper, then printed his portrait on the other side. I then marked, numbered, and cut every 3rd hexagon.

Then I took the hexagons and glued them all down to create a new image. However, this didn't come out the way I expected, as it created a very long image instead of keeping the aspect ratio of the original photograph. I had also aligned the rows incorrectly, which made it look even more wrong.

To fix this, I had to cut out each row and stick it on another piece of paper in the right alignment, which looked like this:

It still didn't look right to me so I tried again. I used a smaller hexagon pattern and did the same thing, but the hexagons were wider than they were tall, making this outcome look worse than the first attempt.

I realised I messed up at some point, so it looks all weird and squished. Again, I thought I should try something else.

I looked at some more of Koike's work for inspiration, and decided to go with squares.

I printed a grid on the back of the photo. I labelled every square, and cut the image into strips, which I then rearranged with alternating strips to create two images. After this, I cut the strips into their squares to make 4 new images, inspired by one of Koike's collages.

I looked at some more of Koike's work and tried to recreate some of his pieces with my grandfather's portrait. Here are the results.

These were all pretty straight-forward, so I decided to challenge myself with the following piece:

I tried to do it with just a ruler and hope, but this didn't quite work out, so I printed out this image and cut it out to see exactly how Koike rearranged the pieces.

I then printed the Koike piece on the back of my grandfather's portrait and used it as a guideline.

I quite like the cut out on the right, as it creates a completely new mood to the photograph, and makes him seem sneaky instead of sincere and professional. I'm not a huge fan of the actual final piece, as the facial features don't quite line up the way they do in Koike's so it just looks really weird. I got the placement all wrong at first, but then I fixed it.

It definitely doesn't have the same effect as Koike's, but I still like it.

I then did some more research and experimentation on other family photos, and they turned out pretty good.

I think I might use some of these in my book, because I really like them. I wonder if I could do this on Photoshop so it's neater, since my knife skills aren't the best.