Week 8

Special Occasion Collage

BY COREY MOORTGAT | from The Art of Personal Imagery

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Collages provide a special way to mark significant occasions, like first birthdays. This week, you'll make a collage to commemorate a special birthday celebration utilizing memorabilia and available remnants from the occasion. Applying background paint colors and adding brush details are the keys to creating colorful layers in this collage.

Materials

illustration vintage book

illustration bulldog clips

illustration white gesso

illustration paintbrush

illustration photographs or printed images

illustration glue stick

illustration craft acrylic paint

illustration water

illustration paper towels

illustration scissors

illustration scraps of wrapping paper from birthday presents

illustration cut-out sentiment from birthday card

illustration Golden Artist Colors glazes (Fresco Cream and Aquamarine)

illustration words/phrases cut out from a vintage book

illustration water-soluble crayons

illustration pencil

illustration Uni-ball Signo white gel pen

illustration strip of fabric

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1. Prepare the pages

Take a vintage book, clip the pages open to hold them steady and coat the pages in white gesso to give them some stiffness and tooth. (If you are working with very thin pages, you may want to adhere several pages together with gel medium for added thickness before coating the pages with gesso.) Allow the gesso to dry.

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2. Adhere images

Lay out the images you've selected in the composition of your choice. Use a glue stick to completely cover the entire back surface of each element (especially the corners!) before pressing them into place.

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3. Apply paints

Select a background color and begin painting the surface of the page around the collage items. Here, I used gray and green acrylic paints as base colors on opposite sides of the spread. Allow a few moments for the paint to dry, depending on the effect you want to create. Leave the paint a bit wetter if you want the next layer of paint to blend in a bit, or let it dry completely if you want the top layer of paint to stand more on its own.

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4. Layer paints

Experiment with layering different shades of paint until you create a look you like. Once the background colors I chose had been painted, I didn't think the end result looked bright and cheerful enough for a celebratory birthday spread. I added a turquoise blue around the focal photo to accentuate the color of his shirt and a coat of white to the gray to brighten it up a bit. I allowed some of the first coat's colors to remain around the borders of the images.

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5. Splatter with water

Splatter water onto the wet white paint, wait a few minutes while the rest of the paint dries and then blot the water spots with a paper towel to allow the first layer of paint to show through.

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6. Paint details

Here, I outlined the collage elements on the right-hand page with a bit of blue paint to make the page look more unified with the left-hand page.

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7. Layer papers

Cut strips of wrapping paper and adhere the paper elements to the collage with a glue stick to deepen the layered effect.

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8. Add collage elements

Use a glue stick to adhere a few final collage elements, like words and images cut from vintage books. Using a white gel pen, a pencil and water-soluble crayons, start adding some final details. Here, I outlined the image used to create the hat and sketched some stars and other elements on the background.

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9. Add fabric

Splatter white acrylic paint on the background. As a final touch, use a glue stick to adhere a strip of fabric along the center of the spread to cover and reinforce the binding, further unifying the two pages as one work of art.

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10. Apply glaze

Brush glaze over the white paper so it is not quite so stark in comparison to the other elements of the collage. Here, I used a Fresco Cream glaze and then Aquamarine glaze.