I have been wanting to embark on a collage project. That is to say, I want to start practicing in earnest to become a better mixed media artist. I had a theme in mind: 99 Ravens. I like pictures with ravens, after all, so why not do a series of mixed media with that as the subject? But 99 might be too many. The parameters of the project itself might be a learning experience.
But first things first. I had one pair of pages left in my art journal that my sister and I started a couple of years ago. I ended up only using part of the pair of collage pieces that I made for that, and this is one of them. I have a notebook of black paper, and I had an idea that if I made the pieces of a small, consistent rectangular size, I might be able to mount them directly in the notebook and they would therefore be easier to photograph.
The photography is a major part of any art project, and I get tired of hefting the kitchen table into the studio and unrolling the backdrop paper every time I want to photograph something. Not to mention the fact that two dimensional pieces are quite difficult to photograph. For me, anyway.
For the support, I used a piece of 9″ x 6″ 140lb cold press watercolor paper. I started by writing something on the background with waterproof ink. The problem with this was that I didn’t really like what I had written. It sounded pretty silly. So I pasted over it with orange tissue paper using matte medium.Â
I also pasted over it the print of the songbird on joss paper, which I’d made for an earlier project. One thing I’ve discovered about water soluble block printing inks is that they are ALWAYS water soluble. No matter how careful you are with the acrylic gel, you will smear some of the design. This is not always bad, as red was the third color of my palette.
I am usually loathe to use other people’s designs, but I’ll use scrapbooking paper as it is really designed for this purpose. After I put on the piece of the domino ad, there wasn’t much cohesion, color wise, so I added the blue starry rice paper and a wash of orange paint. Then I added a wash of blue paint. It looked pretty much done at that point, so the only further touch-up was to scratch away some of the paint to highlight the form of the bird.
The rectangle as it is now is 4 1/2 x 6 1/2 inches. My idea was to do them as art cards, except much larger. The advantage of cropping them all to the same size is that I can change the focus, and I don’t have to worry so much about having perfect edges. We’ll see how it goes.
Lesson I learned from this piece: I need to learn the knack of taking good photos of 2D art.
