Collage Plus Photography

Daily Collages:

I've been posting recent daily collages over on Instagram. Hop on over there and follow me if you wish. 

In last week's series I worked on 7 1/2" watercolor paper* starting with a tiny photograph from a grouping I printed at a drugstore where you can print several shots on one print.  I drew a loose grid on the paper, glued a photo where I wanted the center of interest, and proceeded to extend the content of the photograph outwards from there.

This is similar to the photo I chose for "Running Toward Home", a herd of horses in a pasture at SunRiver, Oregon.  And here is the finished collage:
 

TEARING 7 1/2" SQUARES":Watercolor paper in either 140# or 300# weight is a favorite substrate for my collages. It comes in sheets that measure 21+" x 30". This size can be folded or measured and torn into 7 1/2" squares with no waste. I keep a stack of these squares on hand. 

Here's how I get 12 squares out of one sheet of 22 x 30" paper with no waste...

• Fold in half along the 30" length and tear or cut along the fold, yielding 2 pieces that are 22 x 15. 
• Fold each in half and cut along the fold. You'll now have four strips measuring roughly 22 x 7 1/2.
• Now take each of these strips and measure and mark 7 1/2" and cut off this square.
• Fold the remaining strip in half and cut along the fold giving you two more 7 1/2" squares of paper. 
• I know 22 doesn't divide evenly by 3 but for my purposes, it's good enough to fudge a bit.
• Repeat with all the paper strips and you'll end up with 12 rough-cut squares.

Dwelling - House with red roof and a map

House with Red Roof and Map

5x7 collage

Little Jo plays in the front yard of a very strange but wonderful house. Door photo with implied architectural features and giant flowers.



Dreaming of a Brown-eyed Beau

Little Jo - Dreaming of a Brown-Eyed Beau

5x7 collage with photos

The background of this collage is composed of 3 different red painted papers. the photo inserted is me with my future husband at a fraternity valentine party, c. 1958.

Little Jo with an Old Engine

Little Jo with an Old Engine

7x5 collage

This one is about the logging industry in Oregon. The setting is Camp 18, a logging museum on Highway 26 just east of the coast where many fascinating relics used in logging old growth trees from our forests are on display. I spent a couple of hours photographing the exhibit.

The collage depicts the forests. Little Jo doesn't really know what to think about it all, except to wonder at the loss of the old forests.

Little Jo Hiding in the Forest

Little Jo Hiding in the Forest

5x7 Collage

The background forest is 3 strips of photos from magazines, each overlapping part of the Little Jo photo. The most difficult part is cutting out the Little Jo photographs. It would have been easier to do with the stamp tool in Photoshop but I prefer scissors and glue.

Dwelling

1819 House with Green Roof

5x7

Another in my Dwelling series of daily collages, this one featuring a roof composed with a piece of green stenciled paper where I used a paper doily as the resist and sprayed with green paint. There are lots of painted papers combined to create this house with it's strange setting. These are such fun to do and go together very quickly, now that I have more ideas of how to assemble the papers.

Little Jo in Her New Blue Dress

She never did look good in prints and this is no exception. But BJ suggested that Little Jo needed a blue flowered dress and this is all we could find in the store.
And regarding the composition of the collage...the roof is tilted about 20 degrees too much, even considering artistic license but once I realized it was wrong the glue had dried. Oh well, it's just an exercise.

Tiffany X Two

Tiffany x Two

Here's another quick and easy collage, created with painted papers, part of a discarded painting (bottom left and top), a bit of sheet music, and two canceled stamps. The sweeping curved line across the bottom was a happy accident.

A dozen years back I started tearing canceled stamps off all the mail that came to the house and now I have a good sized collection to use in my collages. Some are sorted by theme: Christmas, birds, patriotic, animals, etc. while others are crammed into a few small cellophane envelopes.

Now I'm thinking that I'll start a collection of bits and pieces of other papers.  I have a little box of triangles, aka roofs for my little houses, and another little box of squares.

Yes, I am a fairly organized person. I had to get interested in organizing in order to control the chaos I'd make otherwise because it doesn't come naturally. I've read lots of books on the subject and put much of what I've read to good use.  Still... I'm not methodical about the way I handle things in my studio and clutter builds up until I can't stand it anymore. So every few days I set a timer for 30 minutes and use the time to quickly tidy up an area of my studio... or my kitchen, or the bathroom.  

Little Jo Goes Hunting

Little Jo has her new orange hunting vest.

She's rounded up a pack of hunting

dogs who'll follow her anywhere.

She completed Hunter Safety class,

and all she needs now is a gun

and a ride and she's good to go.

Little Jo in the Garden of Good vs Evil

Little Jo in the Garden of Good vs Evil

5x7

After living the good life as the first child of parents who had all but given up hope for a family my brother arrived and messed up everything. Little Jo's expression says it all... not only did I have to share my parents who spoiled me rotten but I had hold him for a photo even when he didn't smell so good! The expression on her face makes me think that she has a couple of evil thoughts chasing one another around her brain.

I'm having such fun with Little Jo and plan to milk the idea for all it's worth. I printed a bunch of copies of the 2 pictures and cut them out by hand so I have a collection of Little Jo photos in several sizes. I'll scan more photos and do the same so I have a variety of poses from which to choose.

One of the joys of collage is that the artist gets to move color around and change it up at will, and that's true of cut out images, too. These little girl bits take me back to the days of paper dolls who lived in a cigar box along with their clothes, waiting for me to play whenever I wanted.

Using an image such as this provides an immediate and obvious focal point for a collage, an element that's quite easy to overlook but very important to the finished work. It doesn't have to be a person or an animal. It could be a flower, a symbol, an area of strong contrast of light and dark, or simply something that's different than the background.  Like the photographs in my Oregon sketchbook where the contrast was an extension of the landscape which was rendered in pencil or watercolor.  Look at the Slide in my sidebar to see the sketchbook photos to which I'm referring.

Little Jo Walks On Circles

Little Jo Walks On Circles

5x7"

Daily Collage

No, there's no deep meaning in the name. It's easiest to keep track of pieces by naming the individual "Little Jo" pieces as they relate to whatever else is going on within the piece; circles seems to be as good as anything else I could think up. Naming works of art is Not my thing. I could go with numbers that relate to the date but that doesn't really tell me anything except when it was created and that means nothing to either you or me.

What would you name this?

How do you find names for your artwork?



Little Jo and the Red Chair

Little Jo and the Red Chair

5x7

Daily Collage

There's something about this photograph that appeals to me and I intend to use it for several of my daily collages as sort of a self portrait, though my dad took the picture when I was only three years old. There are a couple of other useful photos in my collection of childhood snapshots, taken with his old bellows camera.

While many artists prefer to make digital collages, I find more satisfaction in working with scissors and glue, getting sticky fingers and coming up with even more ideas as I work quietly at my table.

For me, hands-on making will always be my choice route to finished work, though I also intend to send myself to my own home-school, sitting at the computer to study Photoshop. I've taken 3 PS workshops but my mind doesn't want to retain what I learn and I forget the information somewhere between the classroom and my garage. Layers, lasso tools, and palette wells are just so much noise to my right brain, but I do want to develop a firm working knowledge of the program because I see many ways it would be useful to me as I work with my photographs.

Every room needs a bit of red

Vera c. 1933

Dwelling

5x5"

My parents were school teachers during the start of the Great Depression. One day they came home from school to find that their home had been burned to the ground along with all their possessions except for a quilte and a pillow that a neighbor had snatched through a window. What to do?  Three of her 6 brothers lived in Pennsylvania and NYC and they invited them to come north as soon as the school year ended and they'd have work for them. One uncle owned a drugstore which had a tiny apartment upstairs so that's where Mom and Dad lived for 3 years while slowly accummulating a nest egg. Mother worked behind the counter, dressed in her white uniform while Dad went on the road, cleaning money out of penny machines, another of the brother's sidelines. Once they had enough money to buy another home they headed home to Arkansas.

Mother always said that every room needed a bit of red.

Dwelling

I've decided to work within a series called Dwelling which includes these little house collages but it could be lots of things down the road. I do like working in series especially with my small collages in order to develop ideas for larger works either on paper or canvas.

I've had little time for art making recently but did have a few relaxing minutes last night when I could just sit and play with paper and glue. These two little collages are the result. I'm allowing myself to make my daily collages in a different size, 5x5", because I was getting tired of working in the same format over and over.

I'm considering offering some of my little daily collages for sale here on my blog, perhaps priced at around $30. What do you think? Is there a market? Would you be interested?  Would you buy one as a gift or for yourself? Would etsy.com be a better venue? What's been your experience with online selling? I value your comments and advice.

House in the Forest

House in the Forest with Gecko

Daily Collage

5x7

I thought I was done with this collage until I scanned it and realized that it needed some lines to bring focus. What a difference a few lines can make. I didn't even realize that I had a house in this collage until I scanned it and saw that the gecko was perched on a house shaped paper scrap.

Making this collage was an exercise in giving up "precious". See that bit of paper on the right side and across the bottom? That was a bit torn from a sheet of stencils I made last summer. I kept passing it up because it was too precious to use in whatever I was working on at the time. Finally today I tossed precious to the wind. I tore the sheet in half, then in half again, then simply tore it into pieces so it was no longer precious. Then came the idea of making a collage using black, green, and white. Funny how things work out when you let go and use whatever supplies you have.

House Collage

House with Red Flower

5x7"



As I sat down to make a collage this afternoon my eye landed on scraps of my gift wrapping paper so I decided to start with a cutout of the poinsettia from the paper. The central part of the house is from a photo I took at the Taos Pueblo and I kept building from there, thinking about house, roof, openings and balance. It's all exaggerated as far as scale and balance and color, but I think it works.

Balance

While looking through my editing tools at Blogger today I found several posts that I never did get published. I'll re-read them to see if they're still worth posting. This one is the first....

Singapore

5x7 Daily Collage

Achieving the perfect balance of elements can be difficult in a collage but maybe easier than in painting because you can move the bits of paper around until it's right, while with painting it's place a stroke, stand back, wipe, do it over. Here I worked to balance several blocks of color as well as the bits and pieces that make up this little collage.

Knowing when something is balanced comes with experience... simply making lots of decisions about what looks best, doing miles of work. Sometimes it comes naturally but most of the time it simply takes practice in order to train your eye.

Remember to back up and squint.

Growing up with a mother who liked symmetrical balance was a bit tough. She had 3 pieces of  wine colored McCoy pottery on the fireplace mantle, one large bowl and two matching vases, so of course the bowl was in the middle and the vases were one on each side. If I'd had my way I'd have used the two vases together with the bowl placed in just the right place to achieve balance. And no, my mantle isn't symmetrically balanced.

What's asymmetric balance? Picture two kids on a seesaw. One child weighs 15 pounds more than the other so she schooches closer to the center so both children are balanced on the board and can work the seesaw. It's like that in art.

Mattie and the Girls

Mattie and the Girls

5x7 Daily Collage

My paternal grandmother, Mattie, is the woman upper left in this photo from the 1920s.  Dressed as they are one would think they've been been to choir practice but that roundish thing one woman is holding looks suspiciously like a football... or maybe it's a watermelon.  Aren't you glad we don't dress like that anymore?

Wait

Wait

5x7

4 pieces of paper on card. It works.

Once Upon A Time

Once Upon A Time

5x7

Sometimes there's just not much one can say about a piece. I'm sure you can see the struggle here, but at least I did the work.

I've been asked why I make these little collages, what I'm going to do with them. It doesn't matter what the end result is; it just matters that I do the work. Doing the work, whether it's collage or painting or drawing or writing or exercising or practicing any discipline, is how one improves her/his skill set. I'm showing up and doing the work.

It takes discipline and an objectively self-critical attitude about one's own work to reach a high level of achievement, and it's easy to fall short of the mark. (John Hulsey)