Words of Wisdom to the Beginning Collage Artist

Me at my collage table. Photo by Noor-un-Nisa Touchon

Words of Wisdom to the Beginning Collage Artist

Lisa asks: “I am fairly new to collage and wondered if you have any words of wisdom.”

Take two bits of paper and glue them together. Viala! You have made a collage. That simple act leads to an infinite number of possibilities. By extension, with the idea of collage, you can put any number of things together; images, materials, a film, a symphony, a family, a government, a whole country, an entire world.

But collage as we think of it among collage artists is to take material from the world of paper, usually found material from a wide range of sources, take them out of context and recombine them with a variety of strategies to make artworks expressing an unlimited range of ideas. This is what is so fascinating and freeing about collage. It is a way to interact with preexisting elements and then finding ways to put them together following an idea or an intention or an intuition or a method. It is like a conversation.

The difficulty with getting started with collage is to find your own way to carry on this conversation with the materials and also to figure out how to find the kind of materials that suit your vision. But really you can converse and compose with virtually any materials you come across.

The thing to figure out is what kind of materials are especially appealing to you, that ‘talk’ to you so to speak. This might be magazine papers, product packaging, old books, posters, advertisements, correspondence, photographs, old documents of all sorts, paper money, etc. and you can find examples of artists all over the word using any and all of these paper materials.

So if I were getting started with collage art I would create a pinterest page or something like that and then start collecting digital images of collage artists’ collages and start studying the images, the compositions, the color palettes, the kinds of materials that different artists use and all of the ways they put these materials together and start asking yourself which things are of great interest to you and resonate with your aesthetic interests.

Art is a language, it is like a form of poetry. The starting collagist should study how that language of images and colors palettes and composition and materiality work together to make an art image that makes sense to you, that delights you, that turns on your imagination. Study what the collage images are saying, how they are constructed and the different ideas that are being employed to get an interesting image that is unique to collage art.

Once you look at and compare many different artists’ collages you will start to see patterns and trends and similarities in ways of working with paper and thinking about collage art. In there some place, you will start to see where your own interests are and then  you can start participating in one or several of the ongoing conversations that artists are having with each other through their works.

Feel free to emulate or try to make collages like those that interest you. It is one thing to look at a collage by another artist and another thing to try to make one similar to it. It forces you to think and analyze and in that way you will learn things very quickly. Once you make enough collages of different kinds you will start to realize what is of very specific interest to you personally.

Now there is the question of where do you find the kind of paper materials that you will want to work with. A collage artist is a hunter/gatherer by nature. Collagists tend to have a deep interest in material culture. They have a strong anthropological interest in the world around them and they are collectors of things. The beginning collagist needs to start paying close attention to paper culture. For the last century or so it has been the Age of Paper. While the further back you go much of that paper has already been destroyed but there is still plenty to be found. One has to start figuring out how to ferret out where all of that paper is. Once you start to pay attention to paper you will start to notice it more and more and you can even get to the point of becoming a connoisseur of paper, printing methods, history of the use of paper, etc.

Still, you could gather whatever paper is around you close at hand such as shopping bags and packages and junk mail and magazines. Any big city anywhere in the world is full of paper materials. Places to get antique and vintage paper things are antique stores, flea markets, garage sales and there is always a lot of stuff you can buy on ebay.com.

I have collected paper from London, Liverpool, Glasgow, Paris, Berlin, Madrid, Zaragoza, New York, Saint Louis, Chicago, Atlanta, Miami, Los Angeles and many other places over the years as well as online. Then there are paper fairs you can go to. I have made more than four thousand collages and I must still have at least three lifetimes worth of collected collage material.

Once it becomes a thing you want to do, you will end up with more than you know what to do with at some point. Then you need to store it. I usually organize it in plastic bins and put them on metal shelves and then I can look at the bins from the side and tell which papers are in each bin.

For glue I use thinned down matt acrylic medium and a small  ½ inch or 1 inch bristle brush like from a hardware store. Typically you would want to glue your collage on a base. I use either 300lb cold press watercolor paper or a small canvas or cradled wood panel. Some collagist use the book covers off of old books. You could even use postcards as a base or whatever. Get creative, see what others are doing.

You can tear your paper, cut it with scissors, use an exacto knife and ruler, etc. You can also take any paper and stain it, paint it, draw on it, and then chop that up and make collages. I do that all the time.

If I am working on watercolor paper I like about a 3 inch border. So lets say you want to make a 6 x 8 inch collage. I normally have a sheet of manilla paper or newsprint or a book page out of an old book that is 6 x 8 inches and I glue that into the middle of a 12 x 14 piece of watercolor paper then build my collage on that center paper.

A lot of collagist, at the beginning, want to try to arrange their collage perfectly and then try to glue it down. I might do a loose arrangement just to be sure I have enough of the material I want to make the collage from. If I happen onto an interesting arrangement, I might take a phone photo as a reference and then put the pieces off to the side and then glue each piece down one at a time.

But normally I just start gluing papers down and make the full commitment as I go along and respond to each new piece as I go figuring out what fits where. I think it is more fun and spontaneous that way.

At the beginning just start making small collages one after the next and get comfortable with the process, work out your system and technique and don’t worry about it or judge it. Make a bunch of them as rapidly as you can. Ideas will start coming to you as you go along. Try them all out. You can then look at the bunch as a group later and see what you have got. Then add more refinements to different ones. You can just keep glueing one paper over the next one and see what happens. Make mental notes of what seems to work and what you are not happy with and adjust your method or materials. You eventually figure out what piece should be put first and which should be on top or you can do it like a mosaic and put the pieces next to each other instead of overlapping. Just play around and have fun with it. It might take a hundred experiments before you start getting the feel of what you want to do and what kind of papers you want to collect for making the next round of collages. Plan on making hundreds and hundreds. Number them so you remember what came before what.

I like to work in series with the idea that you get better and better the more you make. Eventually, you get really comfortable with it and you get very good at it. Feel perfectly free to work over the top of any you don’t like or even throw them away. Maintain an attitude of play. Keep looking at what other collage artists are doing. Once you have made a bunch of collages your ability to understand what is going on in other artists’ collages becomes clearer and clearer.

The general collage community worldwide is very open and generous with each other. Just start talking to others, ask questions, etc. by email or on Instagram or however you find contact. Find or start a collage group near you. Get together and make and exchange collages and share materials and stories. Have fun. Keep a journal.

Places to connect with the collage community are
International Museum of Collage - collagemuseum.com
The Paris Collage Collective
Kolaj Magazine
Contemporary Collage Magazine
Trouble Magazine

And of course, keep reading and sharing the Touchonian. Ask questions or make comments below.