Painting with Paper

Autumn Cityscape, collage by Annake

A few days ago we posted our Spring Question and Answer article. The second half of it was devoted to answering a grandmother's plea for art activities for her grandchildren over summer vacation from school. You may want to read it either before or after today's post — or both. This activity is good for group projects, senior citizens, and people rehabilitating from strokes or arm injuries, as well as for children and teenagers.

Today's topic is collage.  The name comes from a French word meaning "to glue".  This is a legitimate art form. Most people associate it with Picasso and Braque at the beginning of the 20th Century, but it is much older. About the year 1200 (C.E.), Japanese artists were making albums of poetry and decorating them with woodcuts and delicate paper collages.  A number of 20th century and contemporary artists have made collages from various materials — some even large enough to qualify as sculptures.

I am going to take you step by step through a simple tissue paper collage.  Because I keep my samples as teaching tools, I will use 8-inch by 10-inch canvas boards, not construction paper or poster board for backgrounds. I use a half-and-half mixture of white glue (Elmer's Glue-All®) and water to attach the paper.

Gluing om the background

I use a small flat brush, but you will find a number of alternatives in the post mentioned above. The tissue paper comes in large packages of several different colors or patterns from an everything-for-a-dollar store. I paint a section of the canvas board completely with the glue mixture. Then I lay a torn strip of tissue paper on the glued section and brush the surface of it with the glue until it lies flat. Overlapping the strips gives the collage texture and mixes colors to make new ones. I continue until I have covered the board completely. (Because I am using canvas board, I turn the loose ends of the paper to the back of the board and glue them down.)

Tearing tissue paper pieces

I let it dry while I tear pieces of the other colors of tissue which I plan to use for my "paper painting". Tearing the paper with a twisting motion gives me some concave edges and some convex ones. This takes a little practice, but don't discard any pieces that don't have curves. You can use them all. If I am planning to overlap colors, I often tear two layers together. Today I am overlapping red paper pieces and it saves time to tear two layers at once. I use a plastic cookie container to hold a variety of colors. (This can be filled in advance.)  These irregular pieces can also be used instead of strips to make the entire background.

Let me show you a piece made many years ago by an adult student who has become a lifelong friend. She first put down a layer of pink tissue pieces. Then she started to cover this with a red layer, working from the outer edges toward the center.  She found that she had enclosed a shape that made her think of a picture she had seen of a Spanish conquistador.  After consulting references, she drew the outlines of this figure on the background and went over the picture in detail with black ink. (Today she would use a fine-line marker.) This is one of many ways to enhance a torn-paper collage. The fact that this picture has hung on walls for several decades demonstrates that these collages are very durable.

I practice the placement of my red pieces until I get the arrangement I want, then glue a few pieces down at a time. Now I have most of the petals of my flower and can use smaller pieces and other colors to make the center.  Notice that there has not been any drawing involved in making the picture.  Once the center is complete, I can apply the remainder of the petals.  Some overlapped pieces of blue and green tissue suggest a stem and leaves. A longer stem supports a just-opening bud. This time I let the entire collage dry overnight. (You may not be able to do this if you are working with a group, but try to do it if at all possible, even if it means a delay until the following week.) Place the remaining glue and water mixture in a jar with a tight-fitting lid.  Wash whatever you have used for brushes thoroughly or discard and replace them.

If the surface of the collage is completely dry when you press on it, give it a substantial coat of the glue mixture. When that is completely dry, it should be firm and shiny and make a small sound when you tap it with a fingernail. It should not be sticky or soft in places.  If you wish, you can further decorate the surface with permanent black or colored markers. The finished collage can be mounted for display.  Mount it on white, black, or colored poster board, with margins of about two inches, wider at the bottom than at the top and sides. Your artists may want to put a label on the bottom margin with the title of their picture and their name.  (If you have used canvas board or another heavy material as the base of the collage, poster board may not be strong enough and you may need a heavier material.)  Children in fourth grade and beyond can do this kind of collage if they have the opportunity to study live flowers, good artificial flowers, or good photographs.

Finished poppy collage, labeled and mounted

Lighthouse collage

Our next kind of collage is a cut-paper collage. As the name suggests, the paper is cut with scissors rather than torn. Torn-paper and cut-paper techniques can be combined, as they are in this picture of a lighthouse and the cityscape at the top of this article. The torn paper is used primarily as a background and the cut paper is used to define important shapes. In this picture the clouds and rocks are torn paper and the lighthouse and other features are made with cut paper.  Some outlining has been done with very fine lines in some places and heavy ones in others. In the city collage, the entire background was done with torn tissue paper, overlaid with cut paper. All the building shapes and the straight-line shapes were cut out, using a more opaque paper for the darkest shapes.

Another kind of collage that is popular with teenagers and adults is the theme collage. This one can be done on construction paper, but I prefer poster board. The collage is made with pictures cut from newspapers and magazines. It is usually based on a single word cut from a publication or spelled out with alphabet letters that have been glued to the background. It is good to have some words that have been cut out in advance, but the artists may choose to make their own. (You may need to set some "ground rules" about what words are and are not appropriate.)  Pictures may be used whole or cut into pieces. If you are using poster board, small objects like buttons, coins, or charms can be glued on for further decoration.  If you have used construction paper for the collage, you may want to mount it on a piece of poster board as described above.

Space themed collage

Tear, cut, and glue!

* For a somewhat different approach to collage, you might want to look at Annake's work in our March 27, 2019 post.       - J.D., Annake's Garden Gnome

 This post by Annake's Garden is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.