Hello

I hope you had a good month. I just thought I’d pop in and share the collages that I made for Februllage. In last month’s post, I mentioned that I was taking part in the challenge led by two collage artists, who posted prompts for every day of February that participants then made collages inspired by. We all then posted our collages on Instagram with the hashtag.

I was really chuffed that I was able to keep up, and produced 28 collages over the month. 4 of my pieces were even featured via the official channels for the challenge! I also connected with a lot of other collage artists -there were 78,000 artworks posted in total which just blows my mind- which was also really inspiring.

Here are the collages I made:

My five tips for making a collage

Gather materials
There’s no doubt about it, having a lot of different materials helps. As well as magazines, vintage bits and pieces, your own made or printed papers, I’d say a book of random things really helps. I’ve used ‘Things to cut out and collage’ by Maria Rivens, which I bought some time ago, and found it also helped as everything on the pages is somehow out of context. For example, sometimes you look at a magazine picture and don’t see the elements that make it up; if you have, I don’t know, a fish that you’ve cut out at random from a page of different fish ready to cut out, you’re more able to (or at least I was) to then see elements in a magazine image that you can cut out and use. It helped me to break down what I was seeing and transform it by putting the image together with something else.

Don’t plan
I might come with an idea after reading a prompt, but if I tried to match what I had in my head to the paper it rarely worked out, so instead I gathered images that I gravitated towards for the prompt and then saw what fit together.

Have something that brings the pieces together
So when I started this collage challenge I decided I’d do them all on kraft (brown) paper. This gave me a restriction but also something to respond to for each one. Now I look at them all together, it makes them feel like they’re a series of works rather than random pieces. (The paper was A4, which I used landscape, but I was working with 1:1 ratio for the photos of the pieces, so the kraft paper isn’t visible for all of them in the photos, but it’s there on the actual pieces).

Have a piece of handmade something in there as well
In nearly all of the collages I made, I included either a line, a print or a stitch that’s by hand. I really like the contrast this brings to the work -none of them look particularly slick- and I like that. It’s all just me doing it with my hands, mistakes happen, things don’t look perfect and I like that handmade quality in there. It makes the piece feel like its mine.

Don’t overthink it
I definitely got more ambitious over the month, but sometimes the simplest pieces actually worked the best. If you try this for yourself, don’t get precious, have a go and if it looks awful, work out how it can look better. You might be surprised with what you come up with!

Until next time!

Lucy