Playing with Polyvore

Artist Sheree Burlington has an article in the Spring 2012 issue of Somerset Digital Studio magazine that practically called my name: Designing with Polyvore: Learning to color outside of the lines.

According the Sheree's article, Polyvore is a fashion shopping site that has been gradually inhabited by all sorts of artistic subcultures, thanks to their online editing tool that she and many others use to create collages using keywords to bring up online images.

At first I was a bit dubious -- I'm about as fashionable as the Amish, and shopping sites are usually very limited as to what they can offer the average writer -- but after glancing through the article and reading about how much Sheree had done with it I decided to go and see what I could do.

I was interested in building some character collages, so I familiarized myself with the easy to use, drag-and-drop editing tool, and within a few minutes I put together this collage using random images and a provided template (these are simply screenshots):



I also built this one:



I decided to forget about the templates and just start stacking images, which produced this:



And this:



I did only the most rudimentary keyword searches and simple resizing of the images I dragged and dropped into the editor; you tech-savvy writers out there will likely be able to do a lot more with it. The images are pulled from various sources on the internet (and links to the originals are provided with each image) so if you decide to play with Polyvore's editor I'd advise you employ it only for personal use to avoid copyright issues.