I’ve been trying my hand at collage lately. I’m so impressed by the beauty of a lot of the collage artists I’ve seen, impressed enough that I want to duplicate everything I see. This is my first time using gesso for anything other than priming a canvas. I saw the technique in Cloth Paper Scissors, and I like the layered opacity of it.
I started with the test canvases from the mural. There were three of them painted orange with the outline of a black crow and two maple leaves on it. First I took my Clarion notebook from last year where I’d written out the first draft of a short story. I enlarged it 200% on my scanner and printed it out. I didn’t change the color; I often write with sepia ink. I wanted to use two pieces, so I traced the outline of a crow’s wing (also from the stencils I made for the mural) and cut around that. This canvas has the negative around the wing; another one has the wing itself. After that I layered white and green-tinted gesso over it.
Next, I cut out the bird image from some paper I bought. I really like birds, and don’t mind making all my pieces themed around them, but after I was done I decided that I really didn’t like using others’ art.
I’d pressed some garden leaves flat to use for printmaking, but I got involved in other things, and by the time I got around to using them, they were too brittle to use for printmaking. They are still suitable for stencils though. I painted bronze acrylic over the leaf, and then lifted it.
It looked pretty good, but it still needed something. I decided to trace around the bird with sharpie, to make a dark contrast as a focal point, and to make the bird more my own. I think it was the wrong choice. I sketched the crappy little birds in the upper right hand corner to create a second, smaller focal point, but it didn’t help.
To salvage it, I cut a linoblock and printed the design over the image, to scratch the other art out. I don’t know if I saved it. With abstracted art, it’s hard to tell if something is ‘done’ or not.
In the future, I’ll avoid using anyone’s art but my own. Just because I don’t like to draw, doesn’t mean I can’t do it. I’ve already started cutting linoblocks with bird images on them, and I just bought more acrylic paint. Also, if I do use photographs or art, I’ll make sure to cut around them more carefully. It takes a little more time, but it doesn’t have so much of the ‘pasted’ look.Â
2 comments
Glad I found your site (via AiSF via Scribblings at LJ). I’m primarily a beader (at the moment), but I look forward to every issue of CPS. I’ve been trying to muster up the nerve to tackle a collage, but so far, all I’ve managed is several layers of gesso, tissue and Golden acrylics on a watercolor paper substrate. Your post prompted me to pull it out again and give it another glaze. (Unfortunately, I remain unassailed by creative lightning, but maybe that’s not important at this stage.)
BTW, it’s odd the tricks one’s eyes play: Until I read your commentary on this piece, I didn’t see the leaf silhouette, but two hands (top piece) and a tree with hand-like branches (bottom). Reading the commentary forced me to refocus, so that now I see either, depending on how I look at it. Interesting effect.
I thought it all came together nicely 🙂