Thinking in Collage. Texturing with AI.
- Valentina Terzieva
- Mar 30
- 2 min read
This piece began as another exploration into how far AI can be pushed when it comes to colouring and texturing custom typography.
I started by designing the type itself. I chose the phrase “Let Yourself Be” because it connects closely to where I am personally at the moment. I have been thinking a lot about spirituality, presence, and the practice of simply sitting with myself without the constant urgency to do, solve, or move.
From the beginning, I knew I wanted a seated figure to live inside the typography — almost as if the message and the body were part of the same sculptural object. I found a statue reference on Pinterest, then used Nano Banana to composite the elements together and build the initial image.
From there, the process became an investigation into texture. I explored different material directions to see how AI could transform the whole piece — from glossy glitter-like surfaces to more dreamy, atmospheric finishes — while still holding onto the custom typographic structure underneath. After that, I refined the image further in Photoshop with colour correction and clean-up.
As a final step, I brought the still into Wan 2 to test whether I could create a simple usable animation. For the less complex shots, it actually worked quite well. Once again, it reminded me that for social content, this kind of workflow can be both fast and surprisingly effective — a lightweight way to turn a design experiment into something that feels animated and alive.
What interests me most in exercises like this is not perfection, but possibility: using AI as a visual collaborator in collage, material exploration, and motion experiments, while still grounding the work in a clear design idea.
Finally, I also experimented with this setup by collaging different images into one. It was quite difficult to prompt distinct textures for each word in a single generation, so I created them separately and then combined them into one final composition.
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