Collage Faces: Class #1

This weekend I spent a wonderful four hours with a lovely group of artists in my Collage Faces class. I would say half the class is attending live and half are watching the replay.  That's the wonderful thing about Zoom.  It's so flexible!

As I'm sure you know, the process of creating a painted paper collage begins with the application of paint onto different types of paper, such as tissue paper, handmade paper, or even recycled materials. Once the painted papers have dried, they are cut into shapes and sizes, often using scissors or craft knives, and then carefully arranged and layered to form the finished artwork.  Class one is all about painting those papers!  Over the course of four hours, I ran through lots of techniques for making painted paper and tips for creating a cohesive palette of collage papers to work with.

Here are just a few of the things we covered in class:

• I asked if there were any questions about the online message board where students can share work, ask questions, and watch video replays.
• We chatted about the different types of paper I like to use for collage.
• I demonstrated various techniques for creating collage papers with a limited palette of colors and tools, such as scraping and layering.
• We discussed the importance of creating variety in the papers to make them more interesting.
• We explored different shapes, trying to add range to our personal shape vocabularies.
• As always, I encouraged people to explore their tools and experiment with different techniques to create something unique.
• We discussed how stamps and stencils can be a double edged sword -- great but also problematic.
• I suggested several methods for making collage papers more unified.
• We used a wide variety of tools from a credit card to pencils to a gelatin plate.
• We discussed the importance of value, scale, shapes, and textures to create useful face collage papers.

For me, the beauty of painted paper collage is in the juxtaposition of different patterns and textures and colors butting up against each other to create something more.  The papers often don't look like much (that's actually a key to the process) but the results are stunning!

I'm excited to tackle faces with this lovely palette of papers at our next class on June 3.  The replay of class one is available to anyone who joins class today.

Thanks for stopping by!