Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hi, my name is Claire Picard and I'm an illustrator for the greetings card, fabric and stationary industries. I have a lifelong passion for flowers, the garden, and the colors that come from a garden. I like to work with collage because you can get a wonderful hand rendered effect and you can create something very modern and very stylized by simply cutting paper shapes with scissors. In this skill share class, I want to share with you my method for collaging, a basic flower bouquet and the stylized and modern way, which you can then turn into a handmade greetings card or miniature postcard wall art. We'll also learn how to develop a balanced color palette and hash develop composition.
2. Getting Inspired: Inspiration, Materials and Colour: It's very important to use reference when looking at flower forms and a good source is Pinterest. It's a wonderful visual resource to inspire you, which I like to use all the time. Check out the board I made to inspire you. If you look up, clear pick on our Pinterest, you'll find a board that I prepared called Skillshare Collage Bouquet inspiration. You will see here bouquets, interesting flower shapes and forms to inspire you, and color combinations and feminine palettes to get you started. You may want to include other forms of flowers and leaves than I have presented here in this class and I would wholeheartedly encourage you to do this so that your end result looks like something you've created in your own style. For this project, you will need PVA glue, one flat ended brush, scissors, one black pen, four different colored papers, one piece of colored card to use as a background, and one Posca paint pen in white, or coordinating color to your tracing papers. Let's just talk a little bit about color, choosing a color palette before we start. When you collecting papers collage, you need to collect colors that you've personally drown to it. I myself am often drawn too feminine, pretty colors because of my fashion background. I love pinks and peaches and other pastoral collages. Go with what feels good to you. You may want to create your flower bouquet for a particular occasion. If you create a greetings card, for example, you may have an occasion in mind such as Mother's day or Easter, or thank you, or birthday. If you need to do an Easter greeting's card, for example, you may want to work on a fresh spring yellow based color palette with some hints of fresh grass green. For a Mother's Day palette, this may include several different shades of pink, for example, or a deep pink and a peachy color. Don't be afraid to break rules about color. Clashing Orange and Pink together can often have a novelty to her composition. When you work with more neutral times such as black, which can add modernity, and drama to in our work, beige colors or skin tones, perhaps cream or white, or the new favorite neutral gray, it's important to have an equal balance between light and dark times. You can also use other colors to replace certain neutral, such as substituting black or dark blue, or dark green, or deep overseen for example. Above all, it's important that you colors feel balanced. I would suggest choosing a maximum of five colors to work with. For this project, you'll need to choose two main brighter colors, close to one another for the flowers. I'm going to use this deep pink and pale pink for my roses. But you may prefer, for example, a pink and an orange or deep yellow and a light lemon yellow, something which will add pop to your bouquet and be pleasurable against sutures and background color. You'll need two more colors for the leaves. Tried to include one neutral tone here, such as brown, gray, dark blue or black, and a leafy color which could range from light green through to permuted turquoise perhaps. I'm going to choose black because it's dramatic and it is deeper craft paper brown color for my leaves. You'll also need one main background color. This one need to be thicker paper or card has its your base paper. It could also be a white paper ground.
3. Getting Started: Collaging Roses: I'm going to work in portrait format rather than landscape but you will see this will make a difference to the final result as we'll learn how to balance composition, so that works either way as we progress. I use a number of different papers for collaging, bypassing I like to use tissue paper as it's lightweight and it gives a semi-opaque quality to the collage I like. You can also overlay colors to create new colors which can give a pretty textured effect. Please remember though that is quite fragile when it's wet and can disintegrate with some types of glue and they can be quite freely when starting out. First of all, we're going to take out two colors that we've chosen for our flowers, these will be at the center of your collage. Here, I'm just going to roughly cut a circular shape. We're going to make a rose, not too big because you need to think about the size of your page. I'd like to make this quite choppy and not too precise, but you may prefer to cut a perfect circle depending on your personal style. I'm going to cut a couple of these in the two different pink colors and different sizes to vary the proportions of the flowers in the bouquet. I'm just going to cut out another circle, slightly smaller than the first one, so we get some varying proportion, varying sizes within the bouquet of the flower shapes. I'm just applying some glue, I like to use just a normal PVA type glue with a fly and the brush to apply it. I found some scrapbooking glues which are non-toxic, whichever mark finish and this is better viewed infront, because when the glue dries, you'll see lesser residue on the page. You can also use a flexible glue stick and it works just as well, but make sure you don't use an old dried out one. When you position your flower, don't give too far close to the edges of the page because as we build the bouquet composition, we will fill these areas in later. Glue down your flower by gluing over the top of it also to make sure it's secure, and this also helps to prevent the tissue paper bubbling and it will dry flat. I'm going to do the same thing with the payload pink circle shape for our second rose. The composition of your bouquet, should really be an intuitive thing and work in progress if you like. But if you start in the middle at the heart of your bouquet with your flower shapes, then you can work outwards towards the edge of the page. Next, I'm going to add some flower bud shapes, so a closed flower shape would be something more elongated in and cutoff at the top. I'm just placing this as I go, building the composition from the center outwards. I'm going to add a few of the bud shapes to form sprigs of buds to add direction to our composition. In floristry and flower arranging with real flowers, the general rule of thumb is to work from the center outwards at three or five direction points. Three-point triangle rule is a way to get started, but if you're a natural at composition, you have a good sense of page you can vary this approach. Just remember to keep things looking balance but don't leave gaps of color by only putting leaves on one side of the page for example. I'm now going to add a few buds in the opposite pink color to balance the composition. I think I'm going to add it down here on this side to even up the placement and the color distribution. Now, I'm going to take some more of the brighter pink and I'm going to cut a smaller circle than before, this is going to be a tiny middle area of your rose. You just place that off-center, this is a good trick also for taking the eye at the center of your bouquet towards the edge of the page. It helps to develop the overall composition because it gives you a flower direction. Now, we're going to do the same in the other pink color, you can adjust scraps for this, slightly bigger this one, the whole flower is bigger to keep that variation in flower sizes again. This one can also be positioned off-center but facing outwards towards the opposite edge of your page, there's time to change the direction of the second flower.
4. Adding Leaves to your Composition : Now it's time to let your bouquet grow by adding leaves into the equation. I've chosen two neutrals for this a craft paper brown color and black. Because black always seems to add a bit of dramatic modern age to an artwork and I like that. I'm going to use the black to cut out the bigger leaves here. By folding the paper several times, you can cut out a few leaves at time. Now I'm just going to cut out an elongated, rather big leaf shape. So let's get down to sticking them in place. You may want to test the positioning of your leaves before you glue them into place. Once again, try to position your leaves so that they point outwards from the center of the bouquet towards the outer edges of the page. Because this is what will eventually give your bouquet a rounded fill and a balanced look, rather like a posy. You may want to add a couple of leaves together also, because sometimes you have a few leaves branching out from the same flower. Look where the dark colored leaves are sitting on the page. I feel like we need some more over here now on this edge. Okay, so now we're going to take our second color and cut out some more leaf shapes. But this time it is important to vary the proportions once again, to add the visual variety to the composition. Here I'm going to cut much smaller leaves this time round, more rounded in form than the black ones. If you look at the overall art work on the page, you can see that I have some gaps here and here. I'm going to use the second lot of smaller leaves to fill in those gaps, creating little sprigs of leaves. Try to imagine as you're placing your leaves, that they are attached to branches. I like to work in clusters. Placing three or five leaves together in a group, on a branch. As you can see, by tackling each different color separately, the composition is building up nicely and it's well balanced. Always remembering though the importance of working from the center towards the outer edge.
5. Adding Penwork: Stems: We're just going to add some details with your black pen, which will have to draw everything together and bring your bouquet to life. I'm using a black pen which is able to adhere to the glued surface and I'm just carefully going to drawn lines from the leaves back into the center of the bouquet. These will be the stems of your leaves. This will also help you this stage to see a more complete vision of the whole bouquet. When drawing the standards for the smaller leaf branches, if you start at the top leaf and draw the line down through the middle towards the center of the bouquet, it will be easier, then you can just add the other leaves on to this main stem. I'm also going to use the black pen to draw the stems of the flower buds up a base of about draw triangular shape to mimic the base of a flower just starting to bloom. Continue downwards, towards the center of the bouquet to form the stem once again. I like to make the line slightly thicker for the stems. But experiment with your own artistic style. You may want to do these stems in a different color pen or perhaps using paint or even collage, if you're enjoying the technique.
6. Using collage to add finer details: So let's get some stylized detail onto these roses. Using the original pinks, I'm going to cut out some crescent shapes, cut them out roughly to add petal details onto the roses. I'm going to use the paler pink on top of the brighter pink and vice versa for the other rose. You can cut these crescent shapes in varying sizes. Position them before you glue them down, and I wanted to present shapes to get the effect of a closed pattern rose. This kind of rose is perfect if you want to stylized or retro feel to your bouquet. As its star is quite typically from an art or art decor era.
7. Adding Penwork: Spriggs: Now we're going to add the finishing sprigs to complete our bouquet. I'm using a white posca paint pen. You can see there are three areas which have less going on in them. I'm going to concentrate on fixing these areas. Once again, we see here how the general 3-point rule that we spoke about earlier comes again into fruition. Rather like you would feel in a real bouquet with perhaps some Gypsophila, I'm going to draw on some spriggy branches. It doesn't matter if the pen goes over some of the work that you've already done in the collage, because that's what real sprigs and branches would do anyway. But you can see how well this technique fills in those final spaces in our bouquet. Then I'm just going to add little bugs or tiny flowers on the ends of each branch sprig, represented by just a simple scribble or blob, nothing more technical than that. You could do them in any colors you'd like. Like little added on accents of color. Another technique, which will give a similar effect, would be to just add some colored dots coming out from the center of your flowers. You can see I've used a gray background, but you could place darker gray dots in the background to fit in spaces and experiment with layering on top of your background, middle ground or foreground. This doesn't have to be precise and this is really where you can bring in your own drawing style and really make it your own individual piece. There you have it, a pretty, posey bouquet made from collage and reworked with pen techniques. I can't wait to see yours. I would love if you could share your work at different stages so that others can see your processes too. I hope you enjoyed this class.
8. Final Thoughts: I hope you enjoyed this class, and I'd encourage you to share your work here at various stages. Please ask any questions as you get along and I'll try to answer them as best I can. If you'd like to try and vary your bouquet by observing and creating your own floor or forms and flowers, or indeed vary the composition, I'd love to see you work here too. Try to work in layers if you're struggling, working on your flowers first, then your leaves, and then tying it all up together by adding pen work over the top. Please feel free to share your work on Instagram. I'd love to see your work. Remember to tag me @CLAIREPICARDDESIGN and use the #CLAIREPICARDSKILLSHARE. I hope this class has inspired you to get involved in more collage work and explore the art of collage. Please look out for any new Skillshare class, which I'll be doing in the future, if you didn't join this one. Thanks for taking part. Bye.
Claire Picard, Illustrator
