Collage in the house
And all over the floor
See this very simple image?
It took bloomin’ ages and made so much mess!
Collage is like playing with Fuzzy Felt. But better because I got to make the pieces myself.
But it’s not like digital where you can move things forever, at some point you glue and that’s it.
And I find it weirdly thrilling. Staring at pieces of paper and moving them slowly and carefully back and forth until suddenly . . . Bam! Pritt Stick!
The pieces never quite end up exactly where I meant them to be. So there’s still a little bit of that lovely hand-made-human-error business.
My whole living room floor was unusable for two days while I made nine very small images with collage.
This whole enterprise was me trying to expand a monotone zine into something with more narrative and more colour. (I originally made the zine in Jane Porter’s excellent comics class)
All the textured paper I used is made from these things:
Water based ink and a roller (both easy to get online)
A glass chopping board for rolling the ink.
A palette knife for mixing colour.
And a big stack of printer paper.
I rolled ink straight onto the paper.
I put paper down on top of rolled out ink and scribbled on the back of it.
I put paper down on top of ink and dragged cutlery over it.
And I kept the colour palette super simple so I wouldn’t go crazy trying to put an image together later.
Extra drawing bits are in neocolour wax pastels. I did them on separate bits of paper until I was confident then drew straight on the drawing.
I don’t usually use pure collage. I love the slippery-ness of ink too much but it’s been so nice diving into a different medium. I’m not going to move into collage full time but it’s such a lovely place to visit!
Is there a medium you like to “visit” and play around with? What materials do you use mostly and which ones do you like to mess about with to mix things up? I’d love to know!
After a lot of snipping and gluing here’s the whole thing:
🧡 PS: I’m slowly putting together an online shop so I can offer limited edition prints of my artwork. Each step of admin has been it’s own Kafka-esque nightmare . . .
💛 However, the actual prints are looking pretty fantastic! They really capture all the lovely textures of the materials. And the paper is a 310gsm beauty, heavyweight with a gentle texture - delicious!
🩵 When the shop is ready to open, I'll let you know first because you’re so bloomin’ lovely!
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This is beautiful!
The ink sounds lots of fun too , might add some inks to my Christmas list !
I’ve actually done a bit of collage recently after not having done any for ages, and it’s so much fun . I painted all the different bits , cut them out and stuck them down then adds a bit of detail on procreate .
Thanks for sharing your process , it’s so nice to see 🧡
This is so lovely Nanette, I do love collage the traditional one! Can't wait to look at your shop 🧡