forward thinking

I have learned a lot while making photo weaving these past couple of weeks and I have not gotten tired of doing it yet, which for me is saying something. There have been times when I have started a project and get tired of doing it after a couple of weeks. I have not felt this way about photo weaving at all, and I am interested in making works like this for the months to come.
I have a vision for my final BFA show and it goes something like this: huge (17x22 or bigger) photo weaving hanging off the wall the same way a woven blanket would be presented. I would like to present photo weavings of people as well as architecture and other aspects of Earth and how Earth relates to people.
At the moment, however, I feel I need to focus on perfecting a technique that works for me in order to create the best photo weavings possible. I have tried multiple techniques and ways of weaving photographs together in the past couple of weeks. For example, I have tried cutting horizonal and vertical lines in my first photograph and then weaving in from the bottom or the side. I have learned that I prefer cutting horizontal lines first. I hope my preferred way translates well when I start working with bigger photographs.

I recently did my first portrait weaving with pictures of my brother. I did not shoot the portraits in a studio so the lighting was not what I preferred, but I was just shooting them to test out how they would look when weaved together. While I could have done a better job with the weaving, I do like how I got the general idea of what it will look like. I will not include text in portraits I shoot from now on because of how big of a distraction text is, and I will play with shadows more, too.

 I used very small sections when weaving these two portraits together to try to get the both of them to show better. After completing this photo weaving I learned that the back image shows more than the one that I cut up. I will see if this continues to happen in future weavings. I also learned that weaving two complex photographs might not work well because too much is going on when the two photos are combined.

 I want to explore weavings that did not feature faces of people, too, so I tried weaving two photographs taken one right after the other of two figures walking up a hill. I would like to experiment with different sizes of sections to see how I can enhance the effect of time, disappearing, change, among other themes in my work from now on.

I recently started working on weaving together two portraits I took of myself print 13x19:

I hope the bigger size of the paper and the simplicity of the background makes both images move visible once I am done weaving them together. I anticipate that my shirt and necklace will be a bit distracting, so in the future I am going to try to get portraits that solely focus on the face.