THE COLLAGE ARTIST -COLLECTOR

The Nauga, A Collage Made from Magazine Materials. 12x17"                              About 1960, © by Ruth Zachary

If you want to try collage only to see if you like it, you can start out with a piece of heavy board and water based White Glue, a small brush, scissors and a small collection of papers gathered from a magazine.

But if you like collage enough to try doing several, it could be important to try to find permanent materials, acrylic medium and pigments, acid free boards and papers, and also to find a good foundations like pre-coated canvas panels.

You may have a specific type of image you already have in mind. Your choices will ultimately define your style, but you might get a head start by thinking about what types of images you like.

Abstraction

                 Geometric composition

                  Organic composition

                  Combined composition

                 May include distortions of subjects, motif or of style

Realism- Subject matter is recognizable

                  Landscape

                  Architectural

                  Figurative Work

                  Interiors

                  Still Life

                  Wildlife      

                 Etc.

COLLECT  TYPES OF IMAGES or MATERIALS for Collage. (Note- these should be significantly altered before using in your collage, unless copyright free. Parts of ads, altered significantly and presented with other images are probably safe.)

Tip: Keep similar colors together in marked large envelopes for future use.

Suggestions:

          Animals, birds, butterflies, fish, insects, botanical drawings, mythical creatures

            Antique or Vintage Photos, posters, memorabilia, costumes, old drawings

            Antiquity references, from Egyptian art, Roman or Greek art, Celtic images, etc.

            Buttons, jewelry, coins, or keys, can tabs or photos of these

            Cards from card games, Tarot cards, Dominoes, Dice, Runes

            Cartoons, comics, humorous illustrations.

            Dictionary word definitions

            Drawings or parts of drawings

            Fabrics, textured and or printed

            Fairytale illustrations

            Floral wrapping paper or flowers from seed catalogs.

            Hand printed, painted or experimentally created papers

            Handwritten letters, recipe cards

            Illuminated letters or manuscript pages.

            Lace, paper doilies,

            Landscape elements, architectural scenes, oceans, lakes, skies, night, day.

            Large close up textures from magazine ads; hair, liquids, flowers, stone

            Maps

            Mechanical elements, watches, wheels, car parts

            Metallic wrapping papers or foil

          Newspaper clippings, photos, old ads, historic reports

            Objects and still life arrangements, baskets, chess pieces, dolls, manikins,

            Op- Art patterns

            Ornamental borders

            Pages from old or new books, such as dictionaries, encyclopedias, poems

            People singles or group interactions

            Photographs, magazine images in color or black and white

            Printed wrapping papers

            Rorschach or Reversed shapes or imagery

            Rubber stamp printed papers

            Rubbing textures (pencil or crayon on paper over relief surfaces)

            Sheet music

            Solid colors in rice papers, tissue papers, textured papers, etc.

            Photos of Statuary, fountains, relief sculptures, furnishings

            Stickers

            Textures created with modeling paste or thick paper, sand, etc.

            Wrinkled tissue paper, rice paper

            Wall papers- embossed, shiny, metallic, textured and printed

            Words and Phrases, Impact sayings, quotes, typography,

NEXT TIME: BASIC COLLAGE METHODS AND TECHNIQUES.

Images and Writing are the Copyright © of Ruth Zachary.

COLLAGE

Abstract in Orange, Tissue Paper Collage    © by Ruth Zachary

This Collage was probably the first I ever made, for a college class. The assignment was to gather colored tissue papers and a few other papers, and to arrange them in a pattern we liked. The backing was mat board, and probably white glue was used. The rectangular spirals were from wrapping paper. Seeing how the semi-transparent colors worked over each other, and discovering the potential for wrinkles were the main things learned here. I still like the rectangles that were not quite squared to the edges of this geometric abstract composition. 

Soon after this I combined blue and green tissue paper strips that accented the extended lines of a drawing-painting of a house, adhered to a canvas. Several years later the tissue paper strips had faded considerably. The above tissue paper creation was kept out of the light to the present. This was another cautionary lesson about using good materials.

It is possible to do collages with printed magazine papers, but they may not be colorfast. Many papers contain high acid content, causing the paper to disintegrate over time. Some pigments in paints and on papers may say they are colorfast, but I have found that in bright sunlight, everything can eventually fade. Some acrylic mediums do screen the color from ultra violet light, and some glazing can provide light protection. You can experiment and learn how to work in collage by using found materials, but if you make something spectacular, you may want to find a way to preserve your creation.

Some books on Collage I have found to be useful: 

Collage; A Complete Guide for Artists,  by Ann Brigadier. Watson Guptill

Collage and Assemblage, by Dona Z Meilach and Elvie Ten Hoor. Crown Publishers

Creative Cardmaking, by Mary Jo McGraw. North Light Books

Creative Collage Techniques, by Nita Leland & Virginia Lee Williams

Design in Photo- Collage by Harold Stevens. Reinhold

How to Create Your own Designs by Dona Z. Meilach, Jay &Bill Hinz. Doubleday

Kaleidoscope, by Suzanne Simanatis. North Light Books.

Romare Beardin, by Myron Schwartzman. Abrams

Work in Fabric and Thread,  by Deidre Scherer, C&T Publishing

Next Time: The Collector - Types of images and papers to collect for Collage.

Image and Writing are the Copyright © of Ruth Zachary.

USING CUT OUT IMAGES WITH LAYERS

Money Tree. Computer Experiment using cut out  images in Photoshop. © by Ruth Zachary

On March 30, I promised to show a new technique in Photoshop. The new technique involved putting different layers together and then changing the modes of the top layers. Before, I had used some abstract layers and some realistic layers, but these experiments never worked well. It did work well when I used a cut out bicycle and a polka-dot pig with an abstract background, and changed the modes to find an example that integrated well. See the blog posted April 4^th and 5^th  on this  site.

With the new method, some of the layers were cut out. In the above example, the image of the girl in the tree was cut out. The coins, also were cut out. These were grouped with two other abstract painterly textured layers, each where the imagery filled the entire format. The format size was 7.5 x 10 inches, to keep the file at a smaller size so working more speedily was possible. The actual images were a little larger than the format boundaries, so layers could be shifted to a better position.

With this method, the artist is not limited to photographic images, or to computer generated abstractions. Layers can be created by hand methods, scanned into the computer, and then cut out and modes can be applied to the experiments. Separate realistic cut outs, from drawings, paintings, or other media, can be combined with hand created abstract shapes, to integrate elements from both.

I have had trouble combining abstraction and realistic images in the same picture plane, something I have mentioned before. Perhaps it is similar to the stage of development children enter, when they become preoccupied with making their drawings and paintings ever more realistic. Before this stage, most children have a natural sense of space, balance, color and composition, and they don’t require such realism of their creations. I suspect it is related to left brained/ right brained functioning dominating the process.

If I create an abstraction, I am not impaired by the same constricting standards of realism. But at some stage, for what ever reason, I found it hard to make an impressionistic version of a recognizable subject, where once it had seemed like second nature.

The writing groups I have taken part in often have a segment of artistic people as well. In my Second Saturday Writers Group, (On Facebook) Susan Buller, brought several Collages she had done for an art show last fall. They were wonderful! I had not been able to attend her show, and I felt so grateful that I got to see them.

She had also displayed her poems with the Collages. She said she got the idea from a show I had at the UU Church for Chalice Arts where I had displayed poems with art.

Then Ken Mowery, another man in our writer’s group asked me if I might do a short demonstration of Collage. He is interested in art as therapy, and collage can be relatively easy for untrained people.  I realized I could do this, as I had done a Collage and Experimental Painting demonstration several years prior, for the Greeley Art Association, and still had many of the examples I collected then.

Collage -  Next time

That made me think of also using my blogs as a showcase for Collage, which I may do for several weeks in the future. I expect I will also work with experimental painting techniques. I will put my abstract experiments on one blog and the more realistic images on this Montage blog.

Recently I have been exploring Computer Art techniques… trying to discover ways to create with the computer to make art. I have not forsaken hand made art. In fact, integrating hand made methods and traditional media using the computer has been my goal. Collage is another step for integrating both realistic and abstract imagery.

To see other experiments with more abstract imagery including the coins, visit my blog, Mixed MediaAbstract Art, posted on May 17.

Images and Writing on this site are the Copyright © of Ruth Zachary.

WHICH MEDIUM EXPRESSES YOUR VISION BEST?

Lilacs in the Snow - Winter Superimposed upon Spring. Photo.

The weather continues to be cold. It snowed on the lilac blooms on Mother’s day. These blooms are the most full that they have ever been, plump and heavy like purple grapes. I rescued a generous bouquet from the bushes, and they are still o.k., still blooming both outdoors and inside.

Lilacs Rescued from the Frost, Photograph.

The apple blossoms this year were also the largest I had seen anywhere, 2 inch flowers from half inch buds, and there were bees busily carrying pollen to every blossom. The petals had fallen two days before the snow, and I hope we may still have an apple crop after the cold spell lifts. We inherited these apples from the previous owner, and one tree was grafted to bear three species of different apples, all quite wonderful. One year we gave bounty to all our neighbors. Two years ago I canned 22 quarts of applesauce.

Apple Blossoms Before the Freeze. Photo

Some artists would take inspiration from Nature and try to paint it.  I think it is enough to accept Photography as an art form in its own right. As an artist, I want to be able to interpret an image in another step beyond that which the camera can capture, or it does not seem necessary.

I might in the future, bring different photo images together in montage, to make a statement beyond the image captured in this moment of time. I also think an artist must think how one medium may express  his or her vision in the best possible way, and how one medium contributes in a better way than another medium. That is not to say that different mediums may not each be used to express one concept in multiple ways.

The first photo image was posted on Mother's Day for my blog, R Z Writestuff.  I also posted a poem there to honor my Mother. There is a connection between  ideas and images used as expressions in different art forms. To read that poem, follow the link,  http://ruthzwritestuff.blogspot.com 

Images and Writing are the Copyright  ©  of Ruth Zachary. Please note, I have imprinted the copyright information into the images shown on the web. The full sized images do not contain the imprint, are available for sale, and are signed beneath the photograph.