The images below show my sequence towards a finished piece of collage work. I started by cutting up images from a magazine and placing them onto a paper and gluing them down. Next I painted four or five pieces of paper with different colours. I tore them up and glued them on to make a landscape. Finally I painted over the top with a glaze. A glaze is a thin layer of watered down paint which allows the colour below to show. All in all a most enjoyable afternoon ‘playing’ with cutting, gluing and sticking.
All this practice was put to the test with two small grandchildren. On the left is our collage picture of rather scary looking sheep. We first collected the wool from the gate down the lane by the ford. After much splashing in the ford we came back to stick pieces of magazine onto a page. Sometime in quite strange positions.. Needless to say the children got bored after a short time and wandered off long before it was finished. But I noticed that they came back pretty quickly to do the fun bits of sticking the wool and the eyes on the sheep!
The two paintings above of local scenes were my next experiments using collage and mixed media. I used texture paste to prime the boards before I started. This gave nice raised textured areas that were quite fun to paint over. I cut out shapes and strips of watercolour paper iand stuck them on as I painted. I painted over these with ink, oil crayons and acrylic paint as though they were not there and like that they made strange edges and raised areas.
The painting on the left is my final effort and I used actual bits of grass with seeds and seed heads which were great fun to do.
Great fun to experiment and I decided that I really like collage and painting with mixed media.