Tuesday, March 8, 2011

Collage start…

Monday I started this little collage from a viewfinder design.  I used a square mat board cut to 10”x10” as my support.  300lb watercolor paper or illustration board also work well.

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Above:  left is viewfinder design, right is my collage

The steps used to get the support covered with this initial layer of paper are:

  1. Trace the main shapes from your viewfinder design onto the support [make sure these are both the same format rise over run, etc]
  2. Trace those lines onto two sheets of tracing paper – one for your “pattern” and one for your “pattern pieces”
  3. Using one of the tracings, cut out the collage shapes.  Fewer shapes can be easier to work with than lots of shapes…  painting into the shapes later, as well as the texture you already have on your collage papers provides some detail anyway.
  4. Consider the viewfinder design.  Which of the shapes feel as though they are behind, or under the other shapes?  These are the shapes to cut out and glue down first.  Hold the pattern piece against your chosen collage paper and cut around the shape but leave some extra to overlap…  Glue these pieces down first and having them a bit too big is a good thing later.
  5. The rest of the pieces need to be cut closer to the pattern.  You may want to allow 1/4” extra on edge pieces so that you can wrap them around to the back – that makes a nice finished look.  Cut these pieces out and glue them down.  Done!
  6. The next steps will be to paint into this as well as paint with collage bits.  If something doesn’t work out you can use your pattern and collage your way back into your major viewfinder shapes.  We’ll see how this goes when I’ve done some of that.  Stay tuned!
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