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'Forest Music' 7x9 paper on canvas board ©Karen Margulis
available $75 |
I see now why my friends are addicted to their bits and pieces of paper. There is something warm and soothing to tearing paper and pasting it down to create something from nothing. It seems mindless while doing it and my friends claim that is why they do it. But after giving it a try I have my own thoughts about the collage process. It is far from mindless!
Making a torn paper collage makes use of everything you know about painting. But in a less intimidating way. You really can't make a mistake....just add more layers until you are pleased. And it really is all about the process of creating. The play is what is really important. As well as the hunting and gathering just the right papers and collaging goodies. But learning always comes from play. I know my friends will be surprised at how their collaging adventure will help them become better pastel painters!
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| I mounted my collage on black foamcore and put it in a frame. |
The collage process was easy. Especially in my friend Jayne's extremely well stocked and organized studio. She has everything you could imagine from tools to paint to stacks and stacks of papers arranged by color. She handed me a canvas board, a paintbrush and a container of matte medium and set me loose. It was like being a kid in a candy store! I tore paper from magazines and used some wonderful paper with specks of gold leave in it. I tore and pasted until my image began to emerge. I didn't want to stop but it was time to leave. I came home and added some seed beads for the holiday lights. I was finished and ready for my next collage! Thanks Jayne, Holly and Elaine for the great afternoon!
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| at play in Jayne's wonderful studio |
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| Jayne's Kingfisher collage in progress |
2 comments:
Well that looks great ... My group of talented artist friends do some collaging mixe with watercolor and or acrylics using golden matte medium to affix paper . One amazing idea they had was to spray Citrasol on old national geographic pages and the papers it yielded were like no other .The ink is a bit better than other mags and gave us fantastic paper to tear.
I made mine an encaustic that day as we were experimenting with that .
My heart belongs to getting dusty though! ��
Sandi
Oh wow! Your painting is gorgeous. I've never had the hang of collage, tried it in several class situations and inevitably never even finished mine. The closest I came was doing an image transfer of some reef photos and then working over them with colored pencils.
I think a lot of it is that I never tried with just colored and textured papers, was always handed a stack of magazines to cut up and tried to work with combining other people's images. I don't think in that way, it's like writing by quoting. But yours is more like "paint with this different medium."
I would screw that up, surely. It really still intimidates me. But imight try something anyway. when I moved here I cut up candy and granola bar wrappers for mylar snowflakes, that sort of folding and cutting pattern stuff works for me. might get a pack of origami paper and try tat instead of photos next time.
Thanks for the article and ideas!
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