by leslieakf | Jan 31, 2016 | Art in a series, Collage
Last year I started a project to create 40 collages on a theme. I chose 40 because that was the number of pieces that came in a pack of chipboard that I was using as backers to glue everything to. I made it through about 23, before I lost momentum. First it started to feel repetitive, then I ended up taking classes over the summer, going on vacation, and taking up painting in August which possessed me until the beginning of the year. I was thinking that I was done with the mountain collages. Aiming for 40 and doing 23 was a pretty good run!
But this month I’ve been floundering around trying to figure out what to do next. I have a few ideas, but nothing that has really gelled yet, so I decided to retrench a little bit and finish the Mountain collage series, while I figure out what my next project is.
I spent a whole day reassembling all the stuff that it took me to make these things: painting the sky backgrounds, gluing them to a backer, making paper to use for the mountains, and finding all of the supplies I’d used last year, which had been scattered to several boxes. Then finally, I made a collage!
My first set of 23 were about 9″ x 11″, and I decided that in order to portray more majestic mountains, I should work a little bit larger, so this next set is going to be around 11″ x 14″. I almost picked up where I left off, but I learned a lot even in this one collage, about how to make the paper and draw mountains, which I hope to improve upon in the next one.
The rest of the chipboard shall be used for something else.
by leslieakf | Oct 21, 2015 | Collage
While I was taking a collage class over the summer and was struggling with a really overcomplicated collage that was just not ever going to come together, one of the other women in the class passed my table and pointed to the scraps left over from whatever I’d been working on. “That’s cool,” she said. So I glued them down.
It could be cropped a couple of different ways. But it just goes to show you that less is often more.
by leslieakf | Sep 16, 2015 | Collage
These go way back (as you can probably tell by their style), but I still find them very entertaining (although it is basically the same joke in each one). I should do more of these.
by leslieakf | Jul 24, 2015 | Collage
We did a collaborative project in collage class, where we worked on a collage for a while and exchanged it with a partner for each to finish the one the other had started. This is one that I started and my collaborator Fern brought on home.
I really like what she did with it.
by leslieakf | Jul 17, 2015 | Collage
I’ve been taking a great collage class for the past few weeks. We work in class and create collages in a couple of hours. It’s a challenge because of the time and materials constraint, but it makes me work and think a little differently than I normally do, which is exactly why I took the class.
For our first assignment, we drew with scissors from a live model. At the end of the night I’d produced these, which were not at all finished. They were totally unresolved in this state.
I finished the first one at home, which I think is a massive improvement. I wanted to try and keep some of the gesture of the live model but give it some kind of theme.
It’s tough to salvage a bad collage when you want to preserve the one interesting shape in it. I gessoed over most of it, but had to scrape some of it off the figure on the left. Now I just have to finish the second one.
by leslieakf | Jul 6, 2015 | Collage
Sometimes when I’m shuffling through collage stuff, I spot a great composition created out of a random pile. It’s almost impossible to glue these down exactly as they are arranged, so I just take a quick photo. Here are two recent random collages.
