How and What I Make into Collage

In the video above, I have shared several of the collages I have made and my process.

I love to work with good quality photo references but many of them I mash together to make my own composition.  You could almost say, I collage them.

Then I draw the design in pencil on heavy paper.  When it is perfect I can begin gathering paper to collage on top.

The paper comes from old wall calendars, circulars that come in the mail, old catalogs, magazines, and even some political flyers.  Anything that has nice quality paper with a semi-gloss surface.  Then I cut or tear the paper to fit my mood and design.  Torn edges can be distracting so I only use them for backgrounds, not faces or main subject matter.

These papers are glued in place using Rubber Cement, not white glue.  White glue would buckle and warp the paper as it dried, and you need the paper to lay flat when dry.  

Rubber cement and magazine paper for that matter, are not archival quality and will yellow and discolor with age.  These collages, therefore, are not going to stand the test of time, but the digital image will last indefinitely.  This is why I like to use this method for children's book illustrations.  No one cares what happens to the originals but the book will last on and on.

I hope you enjoy my video of the many collages I chose to talk about.

Painting Watercolor Botanicals, Goldfinch Cherries

Botanicals are not new.  People have been painting and drawing them for thousands of years.  The earliest surviving botanical work dates back to 500 AD and that was a copy of even earlier work.   Botanicals are basically paintings of plants in all the parts to help identify and classify the plant.  They usually contain the leaves, stems or branches, bark, blossoms or flowers, fruit or seeds, and even the roots.  This makes them for scientific purposes more than art, but people have loved them as works of art for the longest time.  

It isn't known when the first was taken from the pages of the herbal journal or medicinal pages and framed for the wall, but it has been popular ever since.  Right now we are seeing a resurgence of popularity not just here in the US but all around the world.  With that popularity have come many societies to promote and support the art form.  In the US is the American Society of Botanical Artists, in the UK the Society of Botanical Artists, in Australia, the Botanical Art Society of Australia, and in South Africa, the Botanical Artists Association of South Africa, to name a few.

I've only recently joined the ranks of botanical artists when a customer requested two special ones painted for her.  I immediately searched for just the right photo references and then "mashed" them together so my customer could choose which she preferred.  She loved them all so much that she ordered four instead of the original two.  Since then I've been having fun painting even more botanicals. 

Old Widow in Collage

I originally did this collage for an illustration for The FairyTale Alphabet Book, Fairy Tales and Folk Tales from Around the world.  But afterwards, I decided that she would make a nice fine art piece so she needed to be finished.

Step 1.

I always start by finding some nice photo references.  This one I found as a royalty-free photo on Morgue Files.  

Step 2.

I always sketch in the illustration in pencil on medium weight paper.  In this case, the paper is 80-pound cover stock 18" x 22".  Once I have the pencil drawing the way I want it I can begin gathering collage paper.

Step 3.

I gather colored paper from old magazines, old wall calendars, outdated catalogs, circulars that come in the mail and sometimes political flyers.  The paper has to be a nice weight and semi-glossy.  That eliminates a lot of the large magazines common today which are using thin flimsy paper for their interior pages.  However, I find even those magazines have nice glossy covers that work well.  I cut and tear these papers and sort them according to value and hue.

Step 4.

Using rubber cement to keep the papers from buckling when dry, I glue the papers to my drawing.  The hard part is finding just the right value for the shadows and highlights.  I usually use only cut paper for the face because that white fringy torn edge distracts from the facial features.

Step 5.

After the main subject, I create an appropriate background in collage.  I find torn paper for the background works well because the white fringy torn edge doesn't matter as much on the background.

Now it is ready to hang and display.  You should try it.  It really is a lot of fun even if it is time-consuming.  I think it incorporates my love of puzzles as well as painting.