Creative Collage - Using Bits, Scraps, And Left Over Art

1. Introduction: [MUSIC] I've created a lot of classes where we do fun projects, where we cut up art, and I always have people come back and say, ''what do I do with these leftover scraps?'' This class is what came of all those questions because usually I tell people they're perfect for collage, don't throw your scraps away. But then a lot of people are thinking, I don't do collage, so I'm not sure where to get started. In this class, I'm going to show you how I use these pieces and different little bits and scraps and old papers to make really beautiful collage pieces that you're going to love. I'm Denise Love and I'm an artist and photographer based out of Atlanta, Georgia. In this class, I'm going to take you through several projects that are going to be super fun, starting with working in our sketchbook and doing little collages in the sketchbook, and learning mark-making and putting in some extra little bits and pieces and color and texture, and coming up with things that we love. I like starting in a sketchbook because it's low commitment, it's not expensive, and when you're done, I know you're going to have few pieces that you're going to be like, I love it so much, I want to cut this out, frame it and hang it up because I love this one so much, I want to cut out frame it and hang it up. I've resisted cutting it up so that I could make this video. [LAUGHTER] But we're also going to learn how to do pieces outside the sketchbook and I'll show you how I decode the edges and create on a nice piece of watercolor paper. We talk about color and texture and different elements that are going to make that collage really, really interesting. Then we'll go into making a little bit larger piece on a cradle board. I'm going to show you my little trick for creating on board. Because cradle board is not cheap. It's not as cheap as using a piece of paper to collage on. A lot of times I'm like, I hate that. I'm just going to have to throw it away, I've wasted my money, and that really creates a barrier for a lot of people. I'm going to show you my little neat trick for creating a beautiful collage and using a cradle board to give you something that you love every time so that you're not going to be scared to spend a little bit of extra and have a piece that you love in the end. I'm going to show you my hack there and I know you're going to love this. They're perfect for hanging, selling, giving as gifts. These are fantastic. Then the other project that we're going to do in class is the micro collages. Again, I'm going to play and show you my little hack on creating a whole little series that I know you're going to love. These are super-duper fun, low stress. You're going to get a lot of fun out of these. I can't wait to see what you come up with those. I'm super excited to have you in class. I can't wait to see what you come up with. Let's get started. [MUSIC] 2. Class Project: [MUSIC] I'm glad to have you here, and your class project is going to be to create some collage pieces and come back and share with me. I don't care if you do those in a sketchbook and show me those because some of those end up being my very favorite, so I'd love to see what you come up with in your sketchbook. The micro collage ones are some of my own personal favorites, so that would be super fun if you wanted to do a few of those and come back and share those. If you get brave and you do my little hack and you do a cradle board one, that would be fantastic. I just want you to get creative, enjoy the class, clear your mind and don't stress about some of the pieces you're going to create. I'm going to show you some good hacks basically so that you're not stuck in a little box thinking, I don't know what to do and when you're done, you're like, I don't like that. I'm going to show you my hack for getting around that. [LAUGHTER] I can't wait to see what pieces you come up with, so come back and share some of that with me. Can't wait to see it, and I'll see you in class. [MUSIC] 3. Gathering Collage Elements: [MUSIC] In this video, let's take a look at some of the different options we have for collage materials. I've got lots of different little piles here and they're all very different elements that we can use to put together collages that are interesting, have lots of color and depth and variation. To start with, this little pile over here is handmade papers and things that I might've found at the art store. I like handmade papers because they still have that little element of somebody handmade these. But I get some colors and some patterns I may not have thought of myself. But we can certainly make things that look like this just as easy. I find interesting patterns and textures and papers anywhere I can. This is a piece of burlap. This is a piece of very stiff natural paper. It looks like it's made of some type of straw or something. I really like these handmade papers that look like wrinkled paper. This is one of my favorite pieces here. You could also get old bits of painted canvas or we could paint pieces of canvas to use a scrap elements. Another piece of pretty handmade paper, and then I particularly like some of these that have a lot of texture. Maybe it don't have a lot of color because I like the white element here, but you can see that there's some thread, there's some holes, there's transparency to the paper. This is another one of my favorite papers that I found at the art store. Some of these I have found as little 8 by 10 sheets. Some of these are quite big 22 inch size. They're big rectangle sheets. This was actually a great big sheet. When you go to the art store, go over to their handmade paper section, where they have them folded over on different things to show all the papers or maybe they have them in big drawers because there's some of the prettiest papers. I really love this one. Look around for handmade papers. That's one option. I also like vintage papers, things that are out of old books, or just old pieces of paper. I do buy some books for the purpose of tearing them up. Big old dictionaries are a perfect thing for that because those books are like this thick [LAUGHTER] and you'll have that book to tear up for the rest of your life. If you don't want to personally tear up books, then you can get books that have already been torn up, so you don't have the guilt of tearing them up, but the antique market I always find books that are ready for craft. You could also, if you don't have access to or you just can't find, you can look on Etsy and eBay for collaging materials, old books for decorating. They come under lots of little headings there, but I got to a thrift store, buy a couple of old looking books for the purpose of art. Old papers, one of my favorite things to use in collage. I also like natural elements, things that are going to give me texture. They're going to give me some height differences on the canvas and make things very interesting as you're looking at it. I like old piece of burlap is really nice. You can find some of these at the fabric store. Tea bags, this is one of my favorite collage elements. It's transparent. I like the lightness or darkness that you can get from boiling the tea bag and then you can drink the tea and have the tea bag leftover. You can also just buy cheap tea and dump the tea out and a half white tea bags. You can also buy tea bags out there. On Etsy, you might find unused tea bags because some people make their own tea bags and brew tea in it. They do sell at, if you don't want to buy a cheap box of Lipton and use the tea bags from the tea. But I love tea bags, so that's great element. Also, like book covers, book elements. If you tear up a book, don't throw off the cover, keep those elements to use as something in your collage. I also like old bits of lace and tatting and ribbon. Some of these you can find randomly at the antique market, you can find old lay scraps on Etsy. If you make lace or you have something that somebody in your family made and you really have the most perfect peace to use it on. I probably wouldn't use something my grandmother made, but [LAUGHTER] because my grandmother used to do tatting, but I do love tatting and it reminds me of her. When I find a scrap piece somewhere or a piece that I can just buy for a couple of dollars, I can use those elements and not tear up her elements [LAUGHTER] and still have that feel and memory of something my grandmother did. I do like vintage pieces of lace and ribbon and things like that. The main reason that doing a collage workshop is to really talk about using art scraps. Because I have several art workshops in my variety of classes where we are making a big piece of art and cutting little pieces of art out of that bigger piece. Then I have lots of people say, "What can I do with these leftover scraps?" If you're one of those that's throwing this scrap away, stop throwing it away. These are fantastic collage pieces. This right here, is so beautiful you can see all the elements and the interests and the color. This could be our focal element on our collage piece, and while it wasn't enough leftover to do a piece that I might cut out frame, but actually now that I'm looking at it, I could cut little mini pieces of art. I could cut a book mark out of this. There's still lots of uses for this piece, but I thought collage is perfect. I wanted to talk about all the little scraps that you end up with. Don't throw them away. I even did with these in dot art. There's a dot art class on using this for your leftover pieces. But even in that, I didn't throw out the scrap that was leftover from the dot because, imagine cutting this element out and using the dots as part of our collage. I have tons of these because making a big piece of art and then cutting beautiful little pieces out of it is my own personal way, favorite way to make art, because now I'm not as worried about color and composition and where I'm putting things. I don't have a specific rectangle where I'm trying to fill it up and then I get to the end and think, "Oh crap, I wish I had Photoshop that I could shift it over a little bit." When I make these, I can make quite a big piece of just big mess, have fun, mark might do whatever. Then when I'm done, I can then cut out the element that worked the best with the best composition. It really takes all the stress and pressure off of me when I'm creating art. Because I can't tell you how many times I've sat down, I've looked at a white piece of paper. I want to create some masterpiece, and I get angry [LAUGHTER] because nothing is coming to me. I don't know what to do. I'm frustrated, and then I get up and I storm off and leave my art table and don't even know why I'm trying to make art, because obviously can't make art. I mean, I just have all these terrible thoughts. [LAUGHTER] Making the big pieces and cutting wonderful little pieces out of it, really pulled me out of [NOISE] that null drum. Here's one that I have framed up on the wall behind me. Look how pretty these are when you frame them. I think this might be one of these pieces that I cut out of this bigger piece, and you can even see how beautiful the little piece turned out. This was actually one that I got several pieces this size out of and framed at the framer. Beautiful. Now, I have this piece left over to do something yummy with. Just in case you're wanting to see what did you do with the original? I framed some of them and hung them on a gallery wall sitting in front of my table here, so I can be inspired as I'm making stuff. I can look up, but I can say yes, I make pretty art, look how beautiful this stuff is framed and it pushes me on further. [LAUGHTER] I can sit in front of it when I do a class like welcome video and say, "Hey, welcome to my class", and you can see my art behind me. [LAUGHTER] Save all the pieces, if you're doing any of those cut out pieces. If you haven't done any of those cut out pieces, now is a great time to go back and do that abstract class where we talk about making art without all the pressure we put on ourselves. Because that's the first class where I really dive into creating these big pieces that we cut things out of, and then you'll have some scraps left over to collage. Also, we'll dive a little bit into making our own little collage pieces. These are just pieces that I have painted, randomly played with color, played with mark-making, played with different materials, different papers, and just make our own elements to use and tear up as collage. That's what a lot of these are. Just little scraps of things, a piece of painting that was cut up. There's all kinds of wonderful yummy things that you can use as collage elements and we'll be making a few of our elements. Hopefully you've made some art that you wanted to scrap, and really in that vein, I'll show you. I sit down here at my table a lot and just try to play out new ideas or experiment with new art materials and play with water and I try to figure out what do I want to use and experiment with today, because I have lots of different supplies. When you have as much art supplies as I do, too many supplies overwhelm. Is just as bad as looking at a white piece of paper. I will sometimes think up a color palette like, I'm going to work in purple and green today. I'm going to work with neo color to pastel crayons and just see what I can create. That's what I did with this one, and I was coloring different spots with the crayons and then activating it with water and then mark-making and just seeing, what are these supplies do? This is how I experiment and play sometimes on a little piece of paper. I really like how this one turned out. Then I can see what different water-soluble materials do with. By applying, I can figure out, do I like working with acrylic inks? Do I like working with these crayons? Do I want to work with Darwin Ink, tense pencils. What do I want to work with? Let's try out different colors and let's just see. I mean, you can definitely see that these are not works of art that I've created. These were more of experiments. But once they're done, if you don't think you like them or you want to do anything else with them. These would be perfect collage pieces. These are great if you were experimenting, especially with color palettes and just trying things out. Now, we have another element that we can cut up and use. I really liked this one. That's another thing to your different art experiments. If you haven't done the big piece and cut stuff up, if you've just experimented with stuff, bring those out and instead of throwing them away, keep them in a bin for collage materials. Then you know that you're not scared to tear this up and try something with it. I have some more over here where I have played with different watercolors and just seeing how the color blooms out. If I could get different textures depending on how I spread the color and the water and pieces of salt. These experiments too could be different collage elements with different watercolor paints and the things that I was experimenting with there. Just lots of different options for you to think about. You could also use tissue paper. You could also probably go to the craft store and buy a little bundle of collage materials. Look around and gather everything that you think might be something you want to try. Just gather a whole little plastic tub of stuff, which is what I do. Here's my little plastic tub. I just collect a whole bunch of different papers and elements in here that I can then pull from, and see, what can I create with the different things I pull together. Hope some of the different items have inspired you. I can't wait to see what we create today. [MUSIC] 4. Paper Surfaces To Collage On: [MUSIC] Let's take a look at a few different surfaces that we could be working on for collaging. You can do like I'm probably going to be doing throughout the class and you can work on watercolor paper or Mixed Media paper. I'm going to be using £140 Canson watercolor paper for a lot of the things that I do because I have a lot of it. I had some Michael's points and I got to go get a couple of these that were free, and then was school time and they had extra bonus size. It was extra big [LAUGHTER] She'd have it. I've got a nice big thick pad of watercolor papers, so you use what you have. If you have watercolor paper, Mixed media paper, those would be fine to work on. We can cut these out. We can deco the edges so that they're not straight. There's lots of different things that we can do. That it's just not a white piece of paper. I like to do a lot of collage and then cut the piece out. I like to cut up artwork no matter if I'm making a big piece or I'm collaging. Those cutout pieces we could mount on pretty white paper to be framed. Lots of things that we can do. So definitely pull out a nice white, I like this £140, 300 g white paper. We could also work in a sketchbook and I like a £110, which is the 200 g paper. Any of those is fine. I've got a couple here that I just got recently, so they're good size. I don't even know what brand these are. I don't think it says in here what they are. This is the Moleskine. I do have a couple of Moleskine here. I do like the Moleskine. You do not feel like you have to get those. Another sketch book that I use quite a bit this one here. This one is less expensive, the pages are bigger. This is the Arteza. Depending on where you're at, these may be the same type of sketch book under a different brand, so just go for the £110 watercolor paper sketchbook, that's my favorite to work in. If you get, there is a smaller size like 5 by 5. I actually think that 5 by 5 is too small. I have a couple of those stashed here. I got them and I'm like, "Oh that's really smaller than I even thought." Go for, this is 10 by 10. These are like 5 by 8 or something like that. Pick them up at the craft store for collage until you get to the point where you're making some pieces that you really think," These are amazing. I want to sell them or I want to frame them." Or you know you've progressed in your art practice where you're like," This is my thing." Use student grade materials, and practice and get really good at it before you upgrade to artists grade materials for paper. Because we're not using this to paint on, we're just using it as a background to glue things too, so cheap is fine. Another thing that you could consider using is Postcard paper. I've got a couple of these boxes of postcard. This is £110 cold press watercolor paper and I did not buy this especially, this came because I get the sketch box every month [LAUGHTER]. This was one of the fun surprises one month in that art box that I get in the mail. If you've got fun things like postcards, perfect things for collage, anything that you happen to have. Then if you want to kick that up a notch and you're like, I want to collage on things that aren't standard paper, something like that, you use book covers. So if you buy books to use as collage papers, tear the covers off. We're going to be using parts of this book as collage pieces like the spine. This was the spine of this book, but we could also use the cover. We could cut the cover up to use as pieces like this. This was the spine of this book. Or we could use this as our surface. We could use the front side or the inside, and that could be our surface to collage on. Get creative in you're thinking there. If you've got the watercolor or the Mixed Media paper already, start with that. Then that's what we'll be working with here in class just to give you some ideas on different things that we can do with collage. I can't wait to see what fun stuff you come up with. Let's go ahead, and move into our next video [MUSIC]. 5. Wood Surfaces To Consider: [MUSIC] I want to mention another surface that you can collage on that's different than the paper. I could have mentioned it in the paper video but I forgot and then I was doing something else and I was like, oh no, this is a great surface to work on and I at least want to mention it and we might do a piece in here on cradleboard, so I don't want to leave it out. But there are different types of wood board that you can work on and different brands. If you've got some of these experiment, if you don't have them, I don't think for your first projects, I would start here. I would probably work on paper and build your way up to pieces like this. If you were going to hang them in your house or put them up for sale or give them as gifts. They're really great on board. It's just another choice, another option for you. That was fun. This is in the middle. This is more like a paper option, Artist Tiles, which is fun. They're cut pieces of paper all ready for us. That's fun. Cradleboard, these come as flat panels or the cradle on the back, which gives it the depth. They come in one-inch, three-quarter inch, all the way up to two inches inch and a half, two inches. I think the deeper the side, the more expensive the piece looks when you're done. If you were doing stuff for like an art gallery, I think pieces on the deep cradleboard look the most expensive personally. I do like having deep cradleboards. But for little projects, I might like to experiment on a board. Maybe I'm not going to do anything with it or maybe I'll hang it on a gallery wall in my house for something like that, I might just use an artist panel. Then if I were wanting to play with cradleboard, and maybe I was going to hang these. Then I would experiment with the different options. They come in different sizes, and these are raw wood when you get them. You're going to have to prep the surface before you use it. That's a little bit different than working on paper. Working on paper, you can just glue right down to the paper and you're good to go. You don't have to prep that surface. But if you're working on a wood panel of any kind, you need to prep the surface before you begin and I do that with gesso. I've got white gesso and I've got clear gesso, either would be fine if you're not wanting the surface to have a color, you could do the clear. I also have randomly hiding in my art room somewhere black gesso. You could go white-black or clear. You'd want to paint two coats of this on, so paint it, let it dry, maybe paint a second coat and you're good to go. I also have this one that you can see underneath. There is some paint and texture. This is a piece that I was playing as a piece of art, trying to make something I'm sure amazing. [LAUGHTER] But in the end, I'm like, I hate it. [LAUGHTER] You can also use something like this. Because it has texture and pattern on it that could ultimately be possibly part of the collage. But on the thicker pieces that you're putting on, it would cover that completely. If you were to use, say, like a piece of tea bag, then that texture would probably come through on that transparent thin piece of material, which could be fun. If you do a piece on a cradleboard, a painting or something like that and you say, oh, I've ruined it, I hate it. I just going to have to throw this away. Keep it, put it in your closet and just keep it. This has been in my closet for I don't even remember [LAUGHTER] how long. But when I was looking for cradleboards to show you, it was in there and I want you to know that these can be re-used, doesn't matter that you've painted on it. You can cover that with a couple of coats and gesso and you're ready to then collage on top of a used canvas or a cradleboard. You can collage on canvas too, but what I don't like about canvas is it's flexible. That's my own personal preference though. If you're using a board, you want to play with the cradleboard. You can gesso that and that'll get that surface ready to take the glue and stuff without soaking in and releasing your piece later. That's mainly why you're doing it. Because when you glue that board, soak stuff up, your piece may not be as securely fastened as you think and one day you might walk around the corner and part of your collage fell off. [LAUGHTER] If you're thinking of skipping this step, don't. Another thing about these with the deep panels. If your collaging and stuff, you want to paint the sides, this side is going to be part of the art so you can pick a color that's similar. You can pick a white, you can think of black, you can pick a charcoal gray. I like charcoal gray. You could finish the side so that piece is ready to hang when you're done, you don't need to gesso the sides and then paint it. Then I would probably collage and then do any touch up later. If you wanted to, that's my own workflow so you decide what works best for you there. This is another option and for the collage, I find it hard even in painting, to paint something amazing in the confined area and go, okay, that's a masterpiece. I love it. That's not my favorite way to create, which is why I make these pieces that I then cut out. For something like this you could even collage a bigger piece [LAUGHTER] and then cut your collage piece out of the bigger piece and glue it down to the cradleboard that might be less stressful for me if that's the way I did it. Then you could enjoy the gluing and placing process a little more when you're not confined to an exact area and you glue the finished cut-out piece day on, so your choice there. Just some things to think about. I wanted to give you more options and talk about if you use wood panels, you need to gesso them first. All right, I'll see you back in class. [MUSIC]. 6. Collage Glue Options: Let's have a little discussion about different types of glue that we can use to collage with. There's a variety that I would recommend and any of them would be fine. Pick one and go for that if you've already got some of these, start with what you've got. One of the easiest things to use with collage is a glue stick. This would be more, I don't know if I would use this for big, expensive pieces of art that I might be going to sell, but I would definitely use it for anything I'm doing for myself. Something I might frame for my own house. I get the photo glue sticks because they're acid free. Technically if it's acid free, it should last a very long time. You could probably use this in a piece that you were going to sell. But that's something I use a little bit less, and it doesn't go as far like when you're scrubbing that glue on the back of something, you're going to use that glue stick up really quickly. Have several available if that's the route you're going to go. More common is a matte medium or a paste. Mod Podge is probably the most common matte medium. This is a glue and a top sealant, so it's good for either. I like the matte medium. Don't get this in the shiny if you're going to be using it to glue your pieces down. Here's a piece that I did a long time ago, but if you have any glue spillage out here and it's shiny, you're going to see that. You want to have the glue go up under it. If it goes on top of the art piece, it doesn't matter. It's not going to change the look, the feel or the shine or the gloss of your piece. If you go with mod podge, get the matte mod podge, not the glossy mod podge. I've made that mistake and then was using it and thought what is different about this and then read the cover and realized I had bought the wrong one. [LAUGHTER] This is the most economical way, probably. The most common way that you see most people doing collage work is with a gel medium like Liquitex matte medium. This is a lighter weight than the golden gel medium that's in the little container like this. This lighter weight one would be appropriate for translucent materials, lightweight materials when you get into trying to glue down like old book pages, maybe. When you get into trying to glue down thicker pages or things on watercolor paper, you need a thicker gel medium. I would probably, if you just picked one, go for the matte regular gel medium in the container like this. Because it is thicker, we scoop it out with a paintbrush or a palette knife and we spread that on the back and then we have some girth to that to work with. My very favorite one of those really thick mediums is Yes paste. It's acid free. It works for so much stuff. [NOISE] It's amazing. It spreads on a bit like butter. If you've never tried Yes paste, it is a dream. It's what I will probably be using the most because I prefer this one. You put that on with a palette knife. These gel mediums, you probably put them on with a paintbrush. I would pick a one inch size brush or whatever size you feel comfortable working depending on what you're doing. I get cheap paint brushes from the crafts store for this, I don't want to pay anymore than a couple of dollars for a one-inch brush to put glue on because you're going to ruin that brush, basically using it with glue. I do go to the sink and wash these out frequently. But once you've used them for a glue medium or a matte medium, eventually that's probably not going to be a good brush for painting. I keep my glue brushes separate, and I pretty much after it's been used for glue, keep it for glue because you can see there's paint on this. At some point it was one of my paint brushes. [LAUGHTER] I stuck it in glue and I'm like this is now a glue brush. [LAUGHTER] Different options there for glues. I like acid free. Depending on how heavy your materials are going to be, you'll need to move up in heaviness of glue. If it's a lightweight material, maybe the liquid, because this one's very liquidy, it's very lightweight. The gel medium, the matte medium is really the best all around option. My favorite just happens to be the Yes paste. Different glue options that you could try. Use what you got. If you've got one of these, start there. Then I'll see you in the next video. [MUSIC] 7. Finishing Sprays: [MUSIC] Let's talk about finishing sprays. I wanted to get a lot of these little fun supply videos done one after another so that I can talk about each aspect of doing your piece. When you get to the end, if you have used anything on your piece that could smear. Say like in this piece that I had done quite a while ago, this has pastel on it, so soft pastel smear quite a bit. If I was making a collage piece with one of these elements that had pastel krylon in it, I could smear that and get the art supply on my fingers. If I can still smear piece because if it's a scrap like this, I've never formally finished it in any way. Then when I get to the final piece of collage, I'm not going to want to do anything that ruins that piece. If I've thought this is my favorite, I'm going to frame this, I'm going to give it as a gift, I'm going to do whatever with it. I don't want somebody else to be able to smudge their finger and ruin that whole collage piece by maybe getting say that pastel on the white paper that I had used to frame the whole thing out or just ruin the piece in the middle in general. I'm going to want to use some care in a finished piece. Scraps don't have any finish on them. I haven't taken them outside and put any kind of coating on it to stop anybody from being able to come back and smear and smudge this piece. You're going to want to do a couple of elements of protection on your pieces. If you're using pieces like I'm probably going to use this in something because it's so yummy and I forgot it was in here and I know it's got things that I can smudge, before I start cutting up on this piece, I might go ahead and add a fixative to the top of that so that hopefully as I'm working with it and gluing it down, I'm not going to do any additional damage to it. Because even if you put matte medium on top of this as a clear coat, anything that's chalky and still smudgy or anything that's water-soluble, maybe use some Neo pastel krylons like I probably did right there. Anything that's activated with water or liquid or something that's wet, you'll want to seal that down so that when you map medium on top of that, you don't ruin that piece or move those materials around in a way that you weren't thinking you were going to do. To do that, I normally personally use the Sennelier workable fixative. This is for soft pastels and any soft stuff. They also have a fixative for oil pastels which stay really creamy rather than chalky. These you get at the art store. I think I've ordered them off Amazon, which comes from an online art place. The other option that you could use and I found this at the craft store is Krylon. It's over there in their craft paints where they've got crafts and spray paints and glues and all that is this Workable Fixatif. The Workable Fixatif I think is maybe a couple of dollars less than the Sennelier. The difference in these two, I'd be able to really tell. I just got this one about a week ago. When I saw it, I grabbed it. The Sennelier one doesn't change the look of my piece of art. If it's a really important piece or a piece that I'm doing that I'm going to frame like the pretty piece that I showed off in an earlier video which is hanging on the wall behind me. But if I'm going to use it on, say, a piece that I feel is going to be important, I don't want the colors to change. I did everything here on purpose, I've cut it out to the composition I wanted, now I don't want this to darken and change in any way and the Sennelier does not change my colors. The Workable Fixatif it if may or may not change my colors and so the more I use it, the more I'll form an opinion on whether I love it or don't love it, but it is an option. For collage work, it won't matter because if it changes the colors or it does something different, this is a piece of a bigger overall collage piece and it was a scrap junk piece that was leftover so I don't care. In something like this, I might use a cheaper fixative like maybe the Krylon and if it's really important, use the Sennelier one. That's how we're going to seal things around that might move, smudge or activate with water-like the Neo color krylons. When we get to finishing the piece, let's say you've got all these collage, you love it, and now you just want to protect it for the future, now you're talking about a finishing spray. This Krylon Gallery Series UV Archival, I like the matte finish. I would not add a glass of a glossy service to my collage. I wouldn't recommend that, but you experiment and if you decide that you'd like the gloss finish, then you go for it [LAUGHTER]. But this Krylon Gallery Series has been a really nice one for me. It is made for art. It's archival varnish. It's clear, it's non yellowing, so it's not going to discolor later after that piece of art is gone and hanging on somebody's wall. But you could also try some of these others. I've got Matte Finish, clear protective from Rust-oleum. This one is non yellowing, fast drying. The Kamar Varnish, non yellowing, Polycrylic, clear, ultrafast drying. It's water-based. Water-based things are less likely to yellow compared to oil-based things and they stink a lot less and they dry a lot faster. I've had good luck with the Polycrylic. Then I've got this Valspar perfect project top coat. Seals, protects, stays crystal-clear. I have different things because I do lots of different types of projects. I don't know that if I were doing a really nice piece of art or collage work, I would use a standard paint, one I'd tin towards like the ones that are made for art. You can get this krylon at the art store. I would stick with the ones that maybe are made for art a little more than the ones that are just paint surfaces for stuff. But I'm showing them to you because I've got them and I have tried them and I just wanted to talk about that in case you think, "I'm just going to go to the art store and get a clear finish." If it's going to be a nice piece of art, try to get the ones that are really meant for art. They're a little bit nicer. They're more archival than just your paint one's. Little bit on finishing. These we would use after we've got everything on there and we're ready for just a finish spray, I would take this outside, I will do three thin coats of the finish spray. Let it dry and between each coat for a minute or so. Spray it, let it dry, a little spray it, let it dry a little, spray it, let it dry. Then this whole piece would be ready to frame or give away or hang or do whatever you'd like to do with it and you're not going to damage the surfaces that you've got. If you use the matte, you're not going to have weird shine in places you didn't expect. [LAUGHTER] Just a word on [NOISE] fixing stuff and finishing your piece when we're done. [MUSIC] 8. Making Some Collage Papers: I like having options when I do collage stuff, so I thought we would take a look at making some of our own collage papers. Now, one of the things that we've already talked about in making our own collage stuff is using all the bits. Look how pretty this one is, using all the bits and scraps and leftover pieces from the big art pieces that we've created and maybe cut up like this was a great big piece that I painted. Then I cut little pieces out of it to frame and hang which I've shown you in some other videos, one that I have hanging up here behind me on my wall, but some of these, as we've already made collage papers. If you've done some of those, and I've got lots of choices. Of course, this is lots of stuff in here. Also paper with holes in it, so if you've got a hole punch, we can make little hole punch papers. That's definitely an option on some of the papers that we've made. Also, if you've got any little pieces of art that may be you started and you thought, I don't know where this is going and you set it to the side, this could be some collage bits that you're willing to cut up and use for other things. I also like to have teabags, and I like them to be used so that you brew tea in it. You let it sit for a bit so that paper gets nice and dark. I also like painting and doing some mark-making on different lightweight papers. You could do that on deli paper. This is a deli paper that I have a box of that I got at the supermarket, and that's a really nice weight for painting on, and then using this collage, its semi-transparent, it's not super thick. It's a nice common kitchen supply that you can get pretty cheap. We can mark make, we can do different things on here with pencil. This is just a regular graphite pencil. I could use my mechanical pencil if I wanted to come through and just draw some shapes, and create myself little collage pieces to cut out. I could also use colored pencils, I've got this is a pit oil-based pencil, but I could use anything like this. I could use any of my neo color crayons, I've got lots of these and then I've got a little stash here of overflow, but I could use those. Generally what I'm trying to do with some of these is create some pattern, add some color, give me an element, so when I cut this out, I have some type of pretty patterned little element that I could then use for a piece of my collage. I've got different colors, and the thing that I really like about these, let me grab a paintbrush is they're water-soluble. I could paint some of this, and then I could come back in and then smear some of this color around and really make it yummy and interesting as a collage piece. It doesn't have to be all-solid mark-making it could be some solid mark-making and some color smeared around. I could also then add some paint into this, so if I get into my little paint cabinet, maybe I've got a color or two that I can then add a little paint or smush up some color, that wasn't going to come out yeah. I'd have a little paint palette out, but I'm just trying to give you little examples here, on how we might create with some collage bits here. Any art supplies that you have fair game also have. This is which is waterproof India ink. A lot of times what I'll do with this is I'll actually use this to make marks, and I'll drip accidentally. I use it as a mark-making thing, I'm not looking for something specific here other than create some marks for me to then have as a collage element. Now when this is wet, you can add water to it and smear some of this around. Once it's dry, it's waterproof, you're no longer going to be able to activate it and do anything else to it, so you're stuck with whatever you get once it's dry but I do want that little collage element. This so I don't make a mess, but I do like having little black collage elements, little colored collage elements, things with marks, using different materials. You can use pencil, you can use any kind of ink pen, colored pencil. We could get into watercolor pencils. We could use our crayons. You can be pretty creative here, and just to show you a few of these I've made in the past. I've made marks and then painted some stuff with acrylic paint on top. Different colors scribbled through it and added some marks. These are like little tiny pieces of art that maybe you've created that then we can tear up later and create from these used some little crayons to mark make and a little bit of acrylic, and then I took a skewer and just dragged through the wet paint for some marks. Stamped on a black stamp and added a little bit of white paint on an old book page. This is on tracing paper, so it's a different kind of paper or the deli paper. I like it because it's transparent but once you get some ink, some paint splattered on it just something random, it doesn't have to be anything great. Also, like papers with words written on it in black marker so you could do a bunch of these, and then when we tear them up, nobody really knows what you've got there, but if you've got like a favorite quote or a favorite line out of the Bible that you love. I like quotes and things, or if you've got a nice thought that you want to write out or a wish or a dream or something like that. When we tear these up and use them as collage, It's not really going to be there for anybody, but you'll know what it was, what it was for, and the significance, but I like papers with writing and when you're doing that writing, I like it to be something exaggerated. It doesn't have to be real tight, but maybe we could be like nice, tall, exaggerated writing. You could do real short, tight writing. You could do real scribbled writing so that maybe it said something, it's really scribbled. Nobody can read it but you. You knew what it was. That's a fun little collage thing where it's implying there's a writing there, but you're not quite sure what it said. Some different things to think of. Again, more crayon that I have mixed up with some acrylic paint and some marks, I like to do in a lot of these. I was playing with different colors and a little bit of gesso on this translucent paper. I made a lot of these for myself a while back. I want you to play and make some of these for yourself. I really love using a little bit of paint than a lot of gesso because, let's say we even add like, I would usually have a little palette over here with some paint, but let's just add a little gesso here on this, we can now spread that gesso around, change our colors and our whole feel up. Now when that's done, I'll end up with something more like one of these that I created because I had that gesso smashed in there. I could also take my mechanical pencil or I could take a skewer and now come back in and add some marks. If I wanted to just have that implied in there, then we can let that dry. That would be a piece just like one of these pieces that I created. So those are fun. This is deli paper that I created some of these on. I also like to use newsprint paper and you can just order a package of these. What I like about it is it's thin, like the deli paper. But unlike the deli paper, you're not going to have the paint soak through to the back. It's like infused a waxy kind of paper. This paper, you're going to see whatever it is and spill through to the back. So even though I spilled some ink on here, I don't want to throw that out because I could actually spill a bunch of ink on here, just take one of these and come through and do that. Then we could squish it together. We could make it a nice piece of just random abstract collage, something that we can tear up and use. So don't throw these out, even if you get a block on something you didn't plan on. Also have tracing paper, which is the paper that I was actually using before on these, and I like the tracing paper because it's a little bit like an onion skin paper. You can also use onion skin paper. You can use rice paper. You might even be able to use vellum, but I haven't played with the vellum for a long time, so I don't know if it's going to stick down or not, but tracing paper is nice because you can just get a pad of it. By Strathmore at the art store, and it's a great collage weight and it's what I created a lot of these on. So definitely get creative with your surface. Also have coffee filters. I love coffee filters because they are really nice weight also. They're like a tea bag though, because liquids are meant to soak through them. Anything that you do is going to soak through it like a tea bag, but it's just a thicker consistency than a tea bag, a teabag is a little thinner. But I do like the texture and the weight of a coffee filter. You could also consider both a few of those out of the kitchen, creating some designs, patterns, texture, color, just get creative. We're just making junk pieces really doesn't matter if it's beautiful. It doesn't matter if it has any other intention other than, oh, I'm going to tear this up as a little interesting elements somewhere in a piece that I'm going to create. If we do something like that, come back with, again, these are going to soak through. Now we can switch some colors around and then you would want to set these to the side to dry, because anything you do is soaking through just like water soaks through to let the coffee come through. But I like the weight and the texture. Now if you don't want to make this mess go with the tracing paper or the deli paper. When I say deli paper, this is actually called, let me get this out of my drawer here. I have a whole box of it that I got at the big warehouse store, actually called dry wax paper. You can see comes in a great big container if you get it from somewhere like Sam's or Costco or something like that. I like it because it's not that shiny wax paper that you can get. This is more mad at wax paper, but because it's wax paper stuff doesn't soak through, but I'll be able to glue this down, so I can paint and make great services on it. The tracing paper also, let you do that without soaking through, all of these that I did on tracing paper, they dried really nicely without soaking through. If you only have one choice. Did the tracing paper from the art store, if you have wax paper at home, use it because it's great and I already have it, so I decided to use some of it. We can do a lot with this, we can get some color added in. Like maybe I want some just spots of color. This is how I can create that color. Now I can let that dry. Maybe I'll need a little swish blue somewhere. What have you? I want you to experiment, do some mark-making, do some color things like this. I want to see some of these because these could be a nice spot of color in a piece of collage. Do a bunch of these, set them to the side, let them dry, and then just keep a stack of them handy and one ended up at a moment that you're like, I love this little piece right here. I'm going to use that in my collage piece, you have these options to work with. I wanted to just show you a few things that I tried in creating my own collage papers in addition to using pieces of art that you don't necessarily love, and all the leftover scraps from the larger pieces that you've created. If you didn't create any of these and you think, oh, those look interesting, go back to the abstract classes. This is the one that is on making abstract art without all the pressure that we put on ourselves. I show you how to really create beautiful pieces of that. Then those can be in our collages. All right, so go make fun papers. Colors that you like, patterns that you're interested in. Just experiment with some watercolors and watch how the colors balloon, and just create some options that you can then put in a little basket for possible use later. One other thing I want to mention on making these little papers that I just happened to think as soon as I cut the camera off. You can also paint and scribble and draw and create your papers or whatever it is that you want to do on old book pages. The thing about using an old book page is if you want to soak into the page and be part of the page that way you can use it unprimed, if you want to do it where you can paint on top of the page, but the page is still intact and the paint is not soaking through or whatever, you can coat the page and clear gesso first, then paint on top of this and make marks and smudge things around like we did here on this wax paper. Then the stuff doesn't soak through. It's a nice barrier for creating a surface to paint on. So clear gesso, if you want to paint on old papers and have those as some of your collage experiment pieces where you've mark made denied color. Another great surface to experiment on, but definitely use the clear gesso on top of it to protect the old page itself for all the elements that you might be putting on top of it. All right, see you back in class. 9. Gathering Extra Art Supplies: [MUSIC] In addition to gathering up our art supplies for our collage materials and stuff that we'll be making or using during class, I also want you to gather up different art supplies that you might want to use in your collage pieces. Or just keep in mind that art supplies are an added element that we can do finishing touches with on our pieces. Gather your favorite things that you like to do as finishing things. I like neo color to crayons, they make nice marks. I can pick different colors. They're water-soluble if I want to get courageous and add some water and do some stuff like that. I have a little collection of the neo color tutorial ions that I like to use for mark-making. I have a mechanical pencil that I like to use for mark-making. I have my posca pen that I love to add some extra marks to. Sometimes I like to add some extra black ink to the piece, extra little pop a contrast somewhere or mark-making, and so I have some India ink for that. I like this because once it dries, it's permanent. You're not going to be able to do anything once it's wet again. I got a hole punch because on some of these pieces, having that extra element of a cutout is really fun. I'll show you that in a couple of projects and then I have a couple of bigger pieces with cutouts that could work their way into a collage. But I do like a hole punch, [LAUGHTER] got a pair of scissors, and also have just some random paints and stuff like some metallics that are fun because sometimes adding a little metallic pop on the top gives it even another layer of dimension as you're looking at the piece from different angles and you see that little bit of shine, it's exciting. I do have some little metallic paints, gold and silver. I've got some copper and bronze also. Then I might keep in mind for different pieces. Then I'm going to try to keep it simple, I don't want to overload myself with too many collage materials and too many art supply options. These are basically my favorites for that extra touch on the top kind of thing. Gather a few of your very favorite pieces for the art supplies and have those handy because then we can, after we do a collage piece, add some finishing touches. I'll see you back in class. [MUSIC] 10. Thoughts On Composition: [MUSIC] In this video, I want to talk a little bit about composition as we're creating. I'm going to talk about some of these elements as we're going in the different segments of class. But I want to talk about the things that I'm looking for and thinking as I'm going. When I talk about composition, I'm thinking rule of thirds, repeating patterns, contrast, texture, I'm thinking of the things that are going to make my collage piece the most interesting. I don't want everything to be the same color tone. That's very boring and flat and bland. I don't want everything to be the same texture. Again, that's not as exciting as if you vary that up. I don't want everything to be the same elements. Like I want some fabric pieces, I want some solid pieces, I want some transparent pieces. I want there to be enough elements on the page that I'm looking around it at all the interesting things and I'm admiring all the elements that came together to make my piece. So for instance, on something like this, I was thinking nothing, I don't want to center my main thing, when I first looked at this, I looked at the colors. So I'm looking on this side of the composition. Then I'm also then moving my eye around thinking, Oh, look this is a little bit transparent. Oh, and there's some dots and I've got some fun writing coming through and I'll look at this old book page and what does that say and what's on it? Then look at these interesting scribbles and Oh, look, if I move this, I have some shiny elements. Wow, look at this three-dimensional piece of burlap that's coming off of there. There's lots of elements in here that I get excited about when I'm looking at collage. This is a piece that I want to tear out of my sketchbook and frame because I love it. One of my favorite. So on this one, that's what I was thinking. I'm thinking off center of my subjects. I want rule of thirds, I'm thinking maybe I want a third, a third and third on my different elements. Maybe I want to cut something off in the top third and have something else in the bottom two-thirds. So as we're looking at the different pieces, you'll see some of those elements coming in. I also want to think about repeating elements. A lot of times I don't want to just use all the elements once. For instance, in this one you can see a little bit of writing here. You can see a little bit of writing here. If you can repeat an element or a color or say like the scribble I repeated here and here and here, the gold element I repeated three times here and here and here. So I want you to think, repeat some of the elements so that you pull the whole collage together. If you're doing a little series, those repeating elements help tie a series together so that's something to be thinking about. Let's take a look at some of the other pieces. This is another piece that was inspired by the sketchbook piece. I do that a lot. I want to create in my sketchbook to flush out ideas, nail down color choices, figure out like, what's my thing? What do I like? How do I like to do it? Then I'd like to move into freestanding pieces that I can sell or give away or frame. A lot of times I'll do a complete finished piece of art with a deck old age. Then it can be framed in a float frame sitting on top of a mat. I can show you an example of that. I have one of those hanging. Have a lot of these hanging but just an example of something floating in a frame. The deck old edge and how beautiful that is when it's framed up and finished. I particularly love doing that, especially with art because it allows the entire piece of art to shine through. There's no mat coming on top of it covering part of it and with a collage, they're usually thicker than just say, a photo or a flat piece of art. So in a case like this, you definitely want to float frame it or have something where the glasses a little bit off in the frame is a little thicker. I like to have sometimes a fun finished edge to complement that and finish it out. Again, I was thinking my main color focal point off to the side more to the right so that's on the thirds this way. I've got a big piece of page. That's another thing too. I don't want all the elements to be the same size. So I'm thinking whatever my focal point is, do I want it to be bigger? That's what's going to make me focus that way. Or do I want it to be some pop of color? That's what's going to draw my eye to the focal piece. But I want that to be to the side because once I'm drawn to that element, I didn't want my eye to wonder around and admire all the other elements. I've got some flat parts and shiny parts. I've repeated some elements with the writing and the black ink. I've got dots that I've repeated. I've got my three-dimensional piece of fabric year that pulls off the paper. There's lots going on in that. That's super fun. On our piece where we're creating for a cradle board, in this one we teach, do a great big piece of paper and then come back and search out the right composition forests. I find it more difficult to just work on this square and create the perfect piece of art that I'm excited about because when I'm all done, I'm thinking, I just didn't quite nail it. But in creating this way, where I create a big piece, I'm just slapping stuff down and playing and experimenting and working with color and then coming back and searching out a great composition. I am much more successful. So for me in my art practice, that's what works best for me. You're going have to figure out what works best for you if working straight on a cradled board is your thing and you excel at that and you're excited at what you create. That's fantastic. I cannot do that. I get angry [LAUGHTER] bigger. This is terrible, now I've wasted my money on this expensive wood board and I have nothing I like. Why do I even like to make guard? I should just never come up here again. I mean, I go through the gamut there when I get mad at a piece of art. I want to create in a way that works best for me. I have figured out, searching out beautiful compositions out of a larger piece really works best for me so when I'm doing this piece and I'm searching out that composition so that I end up with this. I was thinking rule of thirds and look up, third, third, third. You can see how that's divided up. Also this piece that's on the horizon line is on the top third and we have two-thirds below it. Then we have some elements and pops of color and texture and things that are visually interesting and different and make interesting pieces for your eye to wonder around and admire. So I do particularly love this piece that got created today in class. [LAUGHTER] I hope that this sparks some fun things for you when you're doing it. I also have very dark and very light. So I feel like I've got my contrast in there. I'm thinking of all these different things. Rule of thirds, contrast, repeating elements, give me some texture or something three-dimensional. So that particularly worked well for me on that piece. Then when we came to our micro collages, and if you're playing with these like I am, and then you get something on your paper, this fun little kneaded eraser that you use from the art store is the perfect way of just getting rid of any weird pieces of art that ended up on your paper. Which I try not to do that, but I've moved these around several times during the filming of this class to talk about them and show them and [LAUGHTER] we backup. So you can see all of these in the same frame. Because I keep touching and move them when I haven't put them in a little mat to protect them. I keep moving some of the art supplies that still on here that's not finished on it. So when I'm done with this, I will take these outside and spray my piece of art here with the finishing spray. It would've been ideal if I had sprayed it before I cut them up. That is a recommendation I'll give you if you make the big piece, spray it with a finishing spray and then come back and do your cut ups. And that way you won't have any miscellaneous art supply coming off on your paper like the pastel that I used. So these are because if we say I've got a collection here of five, then the colors go together. There's a repeating element running through here with the colors that I've used. With the circle. I like these little half circle cutouts. These are little scraps that were leftover from the class I did where we did circle cutout art. I like that I kept all those because look how interesting that element is in these pieces and there's no circle on this one. So I could possibly say I have a collection of four instead of five, but I love this piece too, so I hate to throw it out, but it could be one off on its own. But as a collection, this works because we've tied it together. They all look drastically different. If I'm doing little squares and I'm trying to make them all at drastically different for some reason. I just don't get the authenticity and I don't know serendipity of the way that I've done this collection. What I like about this is the circles repeat on every piece and they're all in different places, they're not all in the same place. It looks organic the way it's done. It doesn't look like oh, she put that there. So she put that there. So she put that there just to put that there like it was on purpose. I like that a little bit of organic feel I get from that, also like that they're tied together by color. But again, they're all drastically different. We see different colors standing out on each piece. Like for this piece, it's the yellow for me. For this piece, it's this darker, purpley coloring. For this piece, it's this pink and yellow coming out. For this piece. It's more than lighter, pink and lavender. I see different things popping off at me. But they all still look like a cohesive set that I could use as a collection. So that's what I'm thinking on these. I'm looking at composition. I don't want anything smack in the center and thinking third, third, third rule of thirds. These are cut in half, but this is off centered, so this one's probably less rule of thirds, but at the same time I have enough elements going on where you're not like, Oh, it's in the center and it's boring. This is definitely like third, third, third. So that's super fun. I want you to start thinking about these different things. Make your most interesting elements. Be off to the side or on a third of the page. Repeating elements, repeat different elements throughout your piece or throughout the collection. Let color be a running theme. Think about contrast. You want light and dark. You want it to really have something that's going to pop off the page I use. So it's not all the same color and the same level of contrast so that it's just boring. Then texture, little bits of texture here and there. This one's got the texture with this paper, that's wrinkled, paper that's wrinkled. This one's got the texture with this paper, that's wrinkled and this little bamboo paper. This one's got the texture with the piece of art that I've picked. They're so different elements giving some different exciting aspects to our composition. I want you to think about that all the way through class with the pieces that you're creating. Then I can't wait to see what you come up with. So I'll see you back in class. [MUSIC] 11. Starting With Sketchbook Play: I thought it would be fun in this project to work in our sketchbooks and give ourselves a couple of prompts to work from and create our piece. These are some pieces I've created before in my sketchbook, and this is the guidance that I want to use for This project. I want to use a piece of previous art that I created that I've cut up like these little pieces and samples or a piece that we've created in our making our own pieces section. We can very easily, for instance, take a piece that we've painted with a little bit of paint and some neo-color crayons, and we could use this as our statement piece. We could use something that we've created for this with the collage papers or one of those bits of art that we have leftover. If you did some of the art pieces where you cut pieces of art out of stuff and you had leftover scraps, we can use some of that. Now what I like about having this is the wide color variation and things that I have available for that. What I've done is I've taken my prompt that I've decided on. I want a piece of a little art, I want a piece of an old book page. Any little old page out of a book that you've torn up or old paper or something that you've maybe tea-stained and written on, you can get creative here, but I'm going to use an old dictionary page. Piece of old dictionary page piece of artwork. I want a piece of something that's going to contrast, maybe with a dark color like this had some black ink on it, and I just took my hole punch and I punched some holes out so that I had some extra shape in there. We could say something was shaped, I can use something like this piece with these bigger holes cut out, that would've been fun. I could use a contrasting paper that I've painted with watercolor, and that would be fun with a previous piece of ink that I'm using. There's lots of choices there. I want some type of contrast with a shape cut out possibly, and then something transparent like a tea bag. I do like this tea bag, I have lots of little tea bags that I have used and collected over the years, so I like a piece of tea bag. Here's what I'm thinking. A piece of art, an old piece of paper, something transparent like a tea bag, and then something to add a little bit of contrast or shape or a cutout or something like that. I've done that prompt in both of these, you have the piece of art, the old book page, the piece of tea bag, gotten a little contrast EPs, and then another little piece of my art. This is a little more organic in the flow on this piece of art, I just tore the page, and it really does depend on which way you tear is to if you end up with a pretty edge on the end or if you end up with this white edge. If you're wanting to use the piece of art on this side, you need to tear down on the edge for the side that you plan on using because the side that you plan on not using is going to have this big white edge that might not be pretty, but this side would have a real pretty edge. Just practice a little bit on a piece of junk, piece of paper to get your bearings on which way to tear if you're going to do a tear. On this one, I did a cutout, so I just took scissors and I used that piece of the artwork and just cut that piece out with a pair of scissors. I like both of them. I like the organic feel of this, but I like that they're straight edges and ripped edges on this piece, so there's definitely a reason to use them both. I like having these little tiny pieces. If you're cutting pieces off and you end up with little bitty pieces left over, don't throw those out. This is a piece of that book cover that I have that we talked about in different surfaces. Let's see. It's probably right over here. It's a piece of the spine of this book. If you have little tiny pieces like this, I love that because it adds a contrast, it adds a texture, it adds a different element, so I could have added this in here on there for a different element, that would be fun. I also could have had as my piece of contrast, piece of lace or old fabric or something, so that would've been fun layering those in there. Get creative. You could have actual bits of stuff in there, doesn't have to just be paper, it can be pieces of fabric and book cover. That's our goal. Our goal is a piece of art, some old paper, something transparent, and some type of contrasty dark punch that we can pull out of there with either something that we've painted, or put some ink on. I could've used one of these papers that had this yummy ink contrasts, so that might be used in my next collage, so we'll see. That's the prompts I'm looking for, for the piece that we can create here in our sketchbook. I love working in a sketchbook because if you want to do something that will really grow your skills like a 100-day project, sketchbooks are perfect for that, you could do this as today's a sketch, you could sign it and date it and then go to the next page for your next day's work. Then by the time you fill up a sketchbook, you have an amazing sketchbook to look at, number 1. But you'll also see the differences and the skills and the decisions that you made from the start to the finish. I love being able to see that transition. One thing I will mention that when I was doing this, these are raw pieces of art, they haven't had any finishing spray put on them, so as I touch them, the art gets on my finger. You can either if you want to not have that, go ahead and put a finishing spray on here, which I've actually done with my favorite piece over here. I put a finishing spray on here. I used that, the workable fixative by crayons because I wanted to test it out and see how it was looking. It's still a tiny bit wet, I can smell it because it's fresh. I think it darkened the colors just a tad because this is a piece of that same art, but it doesn't look bad at all. I don't mind a bit the tiny bit of color variation if there is any and once it's completely dry, there may not be any, but I do like the way that's come out. Now this piece out, I shouldn't smear if I'm putting glue on it and putting it down here on my paper. Now having art supplies all my fingers, I do keep baby wipes around to be able to very quickly wipe off my fingers in the art supplies on there so I don't have to get up and run to the sink every few minutes. Keep some of those handy. If you do like I did on this one, I actually smudged and got it on the white paper. To correct that I used one of these art erasers. You just need up to a new side. I took it and just erased that little bit of color because I don't know if you noticed there was color there, or if I smear some color there. This eraser erases lots of stuff. If you end up with a piece, because when I was done with this, I was like, "Oh, I love this piece," but there was art stuff, medium stuff from my fingers smeared on this paper over here. I'm like, "Oh, I so love this," but I don't even feel like I can show it on the camera because I've smudged off onto the paper. That little eraser just cleaned that write-up. If you don't have one of these needing erasers from the art store. This one I've had for a long time, and it still needs up really nicely, so you erase and then you need that whatever you erased off there right into the eraser, basically. But these things are fantastic. It cleaned up the smudges on my paper beautifully without making any extra marks. Now I feel like that's a beautiful piece again. If you're worried about these in your sketch book, smearing onto the other page and you just want to protect them, then you can take a piece of wax paper and put those in-between your pages when you close them up so that they stay fresh and pretty. You may not care about that, and some people do. I like these enough where I would like them to stay nice and pretty so I might consider just slipping a piece of that in there just to keep them pretty for later. This is our project for this segment, let's do one in our sketchbook with a piece of art that you've either cut up or created. Old piece of paper or something transparent and something with contrast, maybe with shapes cut out of it, and let's just see what we can come up with. Now, I'm going to be using Yes Paste, probably maybe matte medium depending on the paper. I've got the Yes Paste and the gel medium here, the Yes pace, I'm going to put that on with my palette knife, which I'm keeping in water because I don't want a lot of glue to dry on the palette knife. In-between uses, I'm just putting this over here in my thing of water so I can wipe any glue off of it that I want. I've got a piece of tea bag here and I'm just going to start playing. That's the thing with the sketchbook. You just want to not think super hard about it. I really like this green, I want to use this as my contrast. This is just watercolor painted onto the paper and then let dry and it's a piece of watercolor paper. I might put some shape in this and then cut around it and see what I can get. Maybe even like a double circle. Let's just like. We could do a double circle like that curve when would that be a little bit different. Each time you do a collage, you can think, okay, so I like my basic format, but how can I make this one a little different than the last one and then eventually you're going to get around to some amazing pieces that are like nothing else anybody else's ever created. You're going to be like, wow, this is mine, it's my style. This is the look I'm hoping forward. Let's just cut this out and have it available. I like that a lot. I think I'm going to cut it tighter and then I can just keep these little scraps over here in my bin and I can come back out later if I need to have a little scrap of some color, I can save those. Don't throw your little bits of white, just keep them off to the side and a little container there. Also want a piece of old book page that can be old music too. This is really fun with the words on the back and the music on the front on this side. I think I'm just going to tear a piece of this out of here. Actually kind of like this piece here. I'm very loosely placing the art. I don't want to start gluing it down yet. I want to get a feel of where I'm going. Once you get started, even if you give yourself some parameters, don't feel like you have to stick to them. If you get something that's like really knocking your socks off, you get that, then just go with it. I almost love this piece right here. It's the second transparent piece, but what if we cut some of this out and give it a try? Definitely, save these. That's a great little extra piece there. I might not like it, but you start off loosely placing things and thinking, do I like it? Is that what I was going for? Let's pick out a piece of this art, I do like the torn edges, so I'm going to go ahead and tear down on the piece that I think I'm going to use. I like this side. Let's just tear that down. You've got to look at which side you're going to use because if you pick the wrong piece, you'll end up with an edge that you didn't intend. I'm going to go back and just tear a little piece off there to get rid of that white edge. You can leave a straight edge if you want. You can cut all four edges, but let's just try with the straight edge. That's fun. Do you want it to be a square? Do you want it to be more organic like the pieces I was originally doing? That's another thing to consider. Shape this one's super organic. This one's a little more square. Really dig in the square. We might try for this one piece to say, well, what happens if we kept it all in shape? That's fun right there. Then when you think, I think I've got it, then you can start gluing stuff down. If you have so many pieces here that you're like, oh, I don't know if I'm going to remember where they'll all go, you could take a picture of this one with your cell phone and then glue each piece down keeping your cell phone as the reference. It's hard to tell. When I'm looking at an angle and not straight down on it but if you look, if you're with the camera, you can tell some composition also. If you think, oh, is that the one I want, take a picture of it and see if that's doing what you wanted it to do or not and the side because you may need some differences. I don't know. Let's see. If we put this in here, we'll have that little bit of green. That's fun. I want to see how like that right there. I think I'm going to glue that down. Let's take a mental picture of that or picture on our phone and that's the layout I think I'm going to go for. At the point that you think you've got something you like, take a picture of it to reference if you think you'll forget where the pieces were, and then go for it. On these little pieces with the holes, you got to be strategic on the glue. I don't want glue to be squishing at all over my sketch book here. I want it to be light but enough to really glue it down. I don't want it to be going anywhere. Then if you think this glue is going to be too heavy because the yes paste is heavy, you can get a brush and then dig into some matte medium. That might be the way to go here on lighter pieces. I just put those on with a paintbrush. I really like having a spare piece of wax paper and then I can glue down on the back of it without worrying about something messing anything up. Now, if you're using really light-weight transparent materials or lightweight book pages. You can use the liquitex matte medium. Now, if I do it that way, I don't remember, I cut this piece off accidentally. If you're doing something like music or words, they need to be facing up. Keep that in mind. Face up. You don't want to stick it on there, and your whole collage be done on your piece of music to be upside down. Let's get this little guy in there. I'm back to the thicker piece. Again, when I stop using that for a second, I put my brush over there and some water. I don't want the glue dry and in the brush, but this thick paper, I really do like this thick or paste a lot better. I'm just eyeballing in my mind what I thought we'd just did so I should have taken the picture, but it's hard to do all the stuff you might think of as you're filming. 12. Adding Extra Marks & Color: Why do I even need to have this under that paper there? Let's just see. I don't know, this was it, or this is going to be it now. Rather than squish this down with my fingers, I'm going to take this piece of wax paper and use that as my piece in-between because this is how you smear stuff onto your page that you didn't intend to is by not having something protect your piece that you're trying to stick down really nicely. But if you have anything on your piece of paper that also will get onto your collage background. This blue eraser is fantastic. Then if you have any pieces that aren't wanting to stick down, before you leave the piece to dry, you can stick some glue in the edges. Look how pretty that is. Glance up into the little mirror screen here like that I have. Beautiful. Something clean on top of this to squish it down. It doesn't have to be wax paper. Here's a clean piece of this newspaper. Just get something else to help you smash down rather than smearing your art with your fingers. I'll just take a second. If you've got glue on top of stuff like you're using a liquid matte medium and got glue on top everything, then that's not going to be as easy. But because I had the glue under everything here mostly, that made it easy to smash down. Here we've got our piece of artwork, our little pieces of contrast with some shape, we've got our something transparent in our old book page, and that one is super pretty. There was our inspiration and where we ended up. Let's do another one before we get out of this. On this next piece, I'm looking at my different supplies. Here, I've got a bunch of this stuff here out to the side, just this whole stack of stuff that we looked at originally. I'm seeing what blends and what's appealing to me as I'm thinking what I want this next piece to possibly be. I thought maybe a piece that I created rather than one of these other pieces from a leftover piece of art. But I may still throw something like this in, but just to give a difference in our collage look, maybe one of these pieces that I've just scribbled some paint, white and green, onto a piece of paper. There's so many different ways to approach a collage. I really like this one too, maybe we should do that one. There's so many different ways to approach collage and the reason why I wanted to do a simple collage workshop like this where we're maybe not getting into gigantic difficult pieces, I'm keeping it a little simpler, a little more streamlined. Because when I made those abstract workshops where we were cutting little pieces out of our big piece, so many people said, "What do I do with all these scraps?" You can say, "Oh, you should use them in collage." But sometimes, what does that mean for you? Do you immediately think, "Oh, yes, I love collage. I can't wait to do it." Or are you thinking, "Okay, I've never done collage. How do I do that?" A lot of people were like, "Okay, how do I do that?" I thought it would be fun. Let's just cut this up here. Nobody knows what this says but me. But it's a fun little contrast of dark and white. Look at that. We could have more than one of these in there if I wanted a bit sticking out somewhere. So many people were like, what do I do with these scraps? Do I just throw them away? I wanted to just give you some ideas on the way that I sometimes approach collage, it doesn't have to be this big, hard, difficult thing. I'm picking out a few rules for myself, some old book page, something transparent like a tea bag, little piece of art, and something to give a pop of contrast, and that pop of contrast could be color, it could be something black, it could be a lot of different things. It could be something like a texture, like what if we took a piece of this burlap and maybe this was part of our contrast and our texture. We could have had that extra feature as instead of just contrast, contrast and texture, look at that. Also I want to throw in another step on this one that I haven't shown you on the other collage pieces or done in that first collage, one that we just did. Once you get pieces like this done, you don't have to be finished. I'm trying to keep it simple for this first little sketch book thing so that you feel comfortable getting in your sketch book and laying out compositions, and figuring out color choices that you like and you're figuring out depth of pieces and is something coming off the page with extra texture and you're dipping your feet in. But the next step can be after you get all these pieces in there glued down where you want it. We can then add marks and paint and more things on top of that, you don't have to stop there. If you're thinking, I love this, but it's missing something, you can go ahead and do your next step too, it doesn't have to be done. Once I get these on here, I may add a little bit of extra marks or contrast or doodles or shapes, maybe dots with white paint pen. All kinds of things that we can do there. Don't start gluing down until you're fairly sure you like the composition. That way you don't get things glued down and then you're like, "Oh crap", which trust me, I've done plenty of times. Once you get more comfortable doing this, it does get easier. Then you might just glue as you go. But I do find it, if you'll just take a moment to place things before you start gluing them. I don't know if that's where that was or not, but that's where it's going now. You'll be happier with your piece when you're done, if you'll eyeball these out before you glue them down. I like that. I'm sticking to my Yes Paste, but you can again use any of these that are kind of grabbing you. Let's keep that clean. Let's use this right here. If you have an old phone book or something like that, those are really handy for scrap paper for getting your glue smeared onto your little piece of art. Look at that. Let's get this little piece glued down. I do like that a lot. There's that. Let's take this and start pushing that down a little and then we can look back at it and think, okay, are we done? Do we want to add more to it? Let's just get it stuck.See what we got. If we got any art medium anywhere on our paper, we can take our little kneading eraser and get that right off. Now, we can step back and look at it and think, okay, does this need any other elements added to it? I love keeping the paper clean. This is like my new re-discovery I used to use these years ago in art classes and then I've gotten away from using stuff like that. Now, I'm like, oh, I need that. Now, we can evaluate. Do we need any more pieces added? Do we want any more contrast? Do I want to take a pencil or some graphite or any of my little neo color crayons and embellish this, any? Do I want to maybe add some? I do like lines. You might wait until this is dry before you start doing something like this. But I do like the extra element that something like this adds if you come back over. Now, this is coming off out of the layers. It's not like it's on the same layer, visually has that step-down. Look how pretty that is. We could come back with a paint pen if we wanted. Let me get my little POSCA pen. Paint pens are my very favorite little art supply tools. Then, for something like this, if I wanted some extra mark-making say here on my piece of art, I could come and just go ahead and add that in. This is why I like to encourage you two to use supplies that you already have. Because it gives you new uses forum. It teaches you how they work with different materials. You figure out things that maybe you wouldn't have thought of before. I'm one of those people where if I want an art supply, I want all the colors, look at this, this gold stuff is some of my favorite stuff. Let's add a tiny bit of gold in here. This is just like a gold acrylic paint paste, but you can certainly use inexpensive gold craft paint. You can use calligraphy ink. I think I've got a little thing like this little craft paint that I've got, metallic craft paint. That works great. This is silver. I think I want gold in this, but silver would be nice to mostly the silver out. But what I like about this paste is I could maybe come in here and do some lines. I could do some dots. I could just do something like that right there. Take a palette knife, and then spread some paint on top. You can do that with any color. It doesn't have to be a metallic.That could've been with black paint, white paint, green paint. I didn't want too much, but just a tiny bit. Then look, it has that little sparkle in it.Look how beautiful that is. On this one, we leveled up a tiny bit. We went from doing our initial piece where we weren't adding any extra marks for layers. And if you'll look at the difference of these two, you can see how building up those layers really did make a more full piece of art there. It really added to the depth that almost finished it off to the point where you're going to start looking at these pieces and thinking, okay, now I want something that's coming off the page. I want to add some extra marks and maybe some color and I want to embellish that. But I want you to start off with just the paper pieces. Figure out what composition that you like. If you'll notice on these, I was doing a little bit larger piece of art, maybe a little bit larger piece of book page and then I was offsetting those with little pieces of the transparent tea bag. Then a little pieces of that pop of color or contrast. Same with this. I had the bigger piece of art, the little bigger piece of paper. The transparent tea bag was a little smaller and then my bits that were popping off and contrasting were littler. Then I had this three-dimensional element of this burlap to put on top, which let me tell you, it was just like all I have of this piece of burlap and it's like my favorite element. I might put that like in every collage ever because look, I can put that right on there. I can put ribbon on there. I could put like an old military flower on there. Let me show you these. You can get like an old piece of ribbon can be part of your piece, they easily could get at the fabric store. This is not even that old. But looking at this, if you collect antique millinery pieces, these are like pieces that may be more pieces for old hats and things like that. But how amazing would a three-dimensional like fabric flower or something like that be. You could have any kind of element, little element glued to your piece like this piece of fabric to give you that three-dimensional feel. Look how beautiful that is. I want you to start off with your paper pieces. Bigger piece of art and piece of book page, smaller pieces of contrast and transparency and start laying things out and getting a feel for the look you like, the composition you like if you'd like torn edges or straight edges and then come back in your next pieces and level that up and do some mark making with some neo color to crayons or graphite or a piece of pencil. Add some marks in there and maybe a splash or two of like amount metallic paint or a paint that will contrast stick or some India ink. That ink would have been a nice contrast on here. Maybe you want some drips, maybe you want to try watercolor, and then some paint pen marks if you want and see how you can level up that piece that you started with to the next level. The sketchbook play is our first project. I'm really looking forward to what you do with these. I'll see you in the next project.[MUSIC] 13. Larger Piece Selecting Elements & Composition: In this video, let's go ahead and start our next piece that's a little bit larger. When I say larger, I don't necessarily mean gigantic, I thought maybe we'd move on to a free-standing piece of paper. This is just some cold press watercolor paper that I have cut in half so that I get two pieces out of it. Any surface that you want to work on is fine if you feel comfortable moving on to other surfaces like the cover of a book, some vintage papers. I mean you could definitely start playing on other surfaces, but I'm going to keep this one a little simpler and I'm going to work on a piece of this is probably a nine by six piece of paper now. Six by nine, whichever way you want to say that. I want to put the collage in the middle of this and then maybe tear the edges so that we have a nice deckled edge when we're done. Something that would be good to frame as a free-floating piece of art, similar to this one that's on my wall behind us here. This is not a collage obviously, but look how beautifully a deckled piece frames up in a floating situation. I thought it would be fun to create a piece that you could then free float frame. We've finished our sketchbook pieces. Hopefully you've practiced and played with lots of different components and elements in your sketchbook and created lots of different layouts and settings. I want to take some inspiration from our theme that we were working on in these sketchbooks. I want a piece of art, I want a piece of old paper book page. I want some colorful elements that can pop. I want a transparent element, and in my case, that's going to be the tea bag, and impossibly some type of element that's actually three-dimensional on the page. We can come back, add some marks and maybe a little bit of paint, and we can do that with any of our art materials, pencils, acrylic paints, pastels, you can definitely just play with your supplies. Paint pens for your extra little bits at the end. I'm going to do a video just on composition, because a lot of times as I was putting these on here, you might have been thinking of, I wasn't thinking of composition, but I was, I was kind of thinking rule of thirds. I wanted my star element to be centered off center, so that's about a third, and then the paper here is about two-thirds, and so the elements that I was placing around that were helping to move the eye around that frame. I don't want any of the elements to be the same size, I don't want them all to be the same color, I don't want them all to be the same transparency. I don't want them all to be the same texture because everything all the same is boring. If we have all the different elements that we have on our little wish list, a little piece of art, old book page, elements that can contrast and pop something transparent, something with texture. Now you've given your eye something to look at and move around and appreciate and really get into the intricacies of what we've done. I mean I've even chosen a metallic paint to shine differently in the light. I like all those differences that we can get if we think a little bit ahead and give our self a little list of goals. I'm going to continue on with our little list of goals as we create our next piece, that's going to be a free-standing piece. I was just pulling out elements, I've got my little tea bags, I've got the piece of green paper that I had painted with watercolor paint. I actually have other papers I've just painted strips of watercolor paper. This is acrylic paint. Do I like that? Maybe I like that little bit of this maroon burgundy color. Do I like a brighter pink? I like this tone down pink, I love this mustardy color, that might be a choice. I do like having strips of paper that I have just coated with some watercolor or some acrylic paint. These are some pieces that we can then cut up and get a little interesting strip of something out of. I really liked this orange and I like this way that the color has ballooned out on here, really beautiful. I like having a couple of these, just handy to look at and pull out and consider. I'm going to have these off to the side ready to go. Another thing that you could use is your transparent item that I have sitting over here is tissue paper. That's always a nice little choice. I also painted some tissue papers, I'm just trying to give you a few more ideas on things that you could paint and have ready for collage sources. Some of these, like look at this bright pink, that's really fun. This one might actually be a nice choice to go with our piece, so may be I could set that out. Look at that, that's really pretty. That's just watercolor paper on a piece of tissue paper set to the side to dry. I love that. I do love the green to. I don't want all my pieces to look exactly alike, but I do want to use in my mind the same elements. I'm using something, a piece of art, an old book page, something with texture or something transparent. You can have more than one transparent item or I could replace this transparent item for the tea bag. So we'll see. I did like this little page with the writing on it. This is just a piece of sharpie writing that I've done on some watercolor paper and we used a piece in our sketch book. I've got a piece of that left over. I went ahead and on this piece I did put some finishing spray on the art piece because there's pastel on it, and the pastel gets all over the place. I do want this to maybe a pretty finished piece of art, so if you have anything on the paper like a fingerprint from something that you've touched., one of these little kneaded art erasers that you get at the art store or the office supply store does clean your paper up really nicely for any little bits of chalky art that you have on your bigger piece. But I did go ahead and put some of the finishing spray on this piece because I know it's covered in pastel, so I went ahead and sprayed the workable fixative on it. A couple of coats outside. So at least maybe I won't smear stuff all over the place today. I really like this fat chunk here. I'm thinking a piece of art over here, a piece of book page. It really would be nice on the book page is if you went the extra step, I'm using dictionary paper because that's what I happened to have. But if you have a favorite book, you could get an old copy of that favorite book for instance, and perhaps pull the page out if that's your favorite, and have some lines and quotes that could be read when you're done with your final collage piece. Something to keep in mind. I don't necessarily want it all to be exactly the same. I did not mean to tear that with the white. You've got to be careful on the way that you tear. I do like that this is a little hourglass figure shape there. That's a fun different shape. Let's just start visually placing things and saying, "I think I've got the direction I want to go." I did really really like black sharpie on paper. See it doesn't matter really what you write on here, so you might write your hopes, your dreams, a quote, just something that you came across or something interesting. Because when we use it for collage, you're going to know what that meaning is, but nobody else is going to really know what you had there, what it said, what it meant. But you'll know in your mind, behind the scenes, you'll just have a feeling that, that was infused into that piece of art, so I like that right there. I like this ink on this wax paper. Just, I want to use it I don't know if it's going to work on anything, but I want to have it in there. Let's just see. You don't have to be in a hurry. This is not created as fast as you can. This is go ahead and take a moment and think outside the box and look at your elements and see just what you think and what you've got going. Tear up pieces and just keep a little tray of torn up pieces because then we could come back and say, " Look at this little piece of whatever, " I think this is part of a book page, and maybe in one of your collages, that's going to be the very perfect thing that you needed. You can cut, but I like to have uneven edges on stuff. We're just going to see what we can have go in here, and keep in mind, I do try to think in a composition rule of thirds. I don't want everything in the same direction. I don't want everything the same size, I don't want everything the same color, so as I'm placing I'm still thinking and moving and deciding. I want this to be in a semi rectangular when I'm done, because as I then deco the edges, hopefully, we'll get something that we love, and we can frame. I'm always looking for stuff I can frame and hang up on the gallery wall here in my art room or throughout my house. That's fun there, and then of course, when we're done, we can add extra marks. How do you feel about this piece over here? I'm also thinking with composition repeating elements, so if I use the black thing here, maybe I want the black thing there. If I've used a touch of pink here, maybe I want some pink in the art. Let's try some of this crazy, I don't know, rice paper, bamboo paper or whatever this weird stuff is, and just see if we can get another texture in there somewhere. I don't really like that. Maybe it's a layer down here. I don't want you to start gluing stuff down until you're to the point of, " I love that." Look at this is hilarious. The words that I've gotten here on this dictionary page is boogie man. If you have a weird page and you're like, this is the only book page I have and I really want to use it, but the words are weird, this might be an instance where you take some India ink or something on top afterwards and you obscure what's going on. That's really funny. What's on the other side? Rosemary, I like that word better. Let's use the side instead and not fill in this little piece here. I do like this transparent pink thing. Let me tear this piece of art down a little bit so that it's a little more, one thirds two-thirds ratio. I also like, and we might try that with this. I might not like it but I also like the hole punch things. I've gotten a little hole punch over here. Maybe we'd like this with some holes in it. Then of course, keep the little holes that you punch out because those could make a nice little element on your collage also. I like that with the little cutouts peeking through. That's fun. All right, so let's go ahead and start gluing some of this down. Of course you can use matte medium, you can use mod podge, you can use glue sticks. I am going to go back to my own personal favorite which is the yes paste. Yest, I want to say yest. Just the yes paste because it's archival and now I'm to the point when I make stuff, I want it to be something that I'm going to love and want to hang, so I want to go ahead and use materials that will be okay through the years. The glue stick and stuff is perfect for like sketchbook. My glue stick, I don't know, it just didn't seem as tacky or stick down as well as this paste. I just loved the paste. I want to put this underneath that. Make sure when you're gluing stuff down that if you've got writing on things that the writing is going the right direction, I've got a piece of wax paper here that I can just lean onto. Put some glue on this paper here, and you can mix your glues if you're using something thin, like this piece of tissue paper, you might use a glue stick or matte medium for that, and then for your thicker pieces, move up to something like this thicker paste. I also have just some old credit cards which are really nice to smooth your stuff down. Its real gentle with that. Here's our piece of newspaper which I stuck to the piece of paper I was just using. Let's pull this back over here, piece of newspaper. This is a piece of book page. Sorry. That's the funny thing when you're working with glue stuff. The glue gets everywhere. All right, so let's just visually see where we wanted this. This stuff is pretty thick. You have a minute or so that you could come back and rearrange if you needed, but after a bit you don't have any extra time. If I need to move that little piece of paper, I've got a second. 14. Finishing Marks And Adding Interest: [MUSIC] [NOISE] Just take this down. Let's go ahead and do that before I get these all set. Yes, you have glue all over your fingers [LAUGHTER]. Is what it is. Just know that that's what's going to happen. I'm going to get a piece here of extra wax paper so that I can come and just flatten this on here. I like using something like the wax paper because it's less likely to stick and more your piece. [NOISE] I do like having something like this to lean on my piece with maybe flatten out if I need to because we're not going to damage what's underneath and it's not going to permanently stick down. We can pull it right back off. I love the direction that this is going. Let's just think. Now I'm going to want to do I want to glue anything else on here. I still have my layer of texture, so yes, I do want to still glue something thereon. I like it right here. What do we think of that liking that? This is a little bit similar to what we did on our sketchbook piece. At the same time we're moving stuff in different spots, and just seeing, do we like this layout and this texture better than we did on the last piece. I want that right there where that piece of art goes in. [NOISE] Then we'll let that dry. We're having that, we've got some movement. We've got color and we've got rule of thirds, third bigger, two-thirds bigger. We've got our purple color and our little pop of little items. Now, I want to add maybe some neo-color crayon, I really liked the way that looked on our practice piece. I'm going to go back and do some little marks here. Don't be afraid to go outside the collage area. On the collage area and get some marks in there and just extend that to however it is that you're feeling of that moment. [NOISE] I like that little bit of mark making one extra dimension that we've got. I've got some paint pen. Actually, I love dots. I might just put a dot in everything I ever make. I like paint pen dots. That's your preference there you can, as many or as few in your extra little elements as you want following a line that I drew on top of this piece of tissue paper there. I like that, fun. I was following that little green line as a possible stoppage place, but I could keep on going with that line if I wanted because it actually does gray here and goes up. We could fill this whole little spot with dots. You want to be real careful where you're touching on your paper at this point, if you've gotten any art supplies on your fingers, you don't want to be smudging your paper any. I like that, I've got some lines, I've got a texture, I've got some marks. I also like a little bit of paint on here. Pick your favorite paint element. I'm going to go from my little metallic paint again. Of course, you can get yummy metallic paints to play in, but I'm going to play in one that I love. You, pick the one that you love. It gets easier the more things that you play in and discover. Then I'm going to take my palette knife, and just see where can I add some interest? I don't want it everywhere but again, I'm thinking in repetition and multiples cannot put that in more than one spot, and is that going to be all that I do like that. [NOISE] Maybe, look at that right there on the edge. [NOISE] That was pretty now we see this little tiny bit on the edge, I love it. [LAUGHTER] Super pretty. Now, I told you that we were going to maybe deco these edges, but you cannot do that while your piece is wet. At this point we would need to set this to the side and let it do some drawing before I tear the edges and to tear the edges, I'm basically going to take a ruler and hold it down on my piece and tear the paper so that I get that nice torn edge but when this piece dries, we'll come back and do that. Let's set this to the side and let it do its little thing for a while, and then we'll come back and read those edges and have a final piece that we're ready to mount onto, a piece of mat board and frame in some type of floating frame. I hope you enjoy this project. I definitely can't wait to see the pieces that you come up with. I will be back in just a bit after this dries. One of the things that I'm thinking as I'm talking and looking at this, I'm almost feeling like it could use some more contrast. I'm looking at it and I'm thinking, yeah, we have those little black elements on there, but are they enough? Let's risk it. Now you get to a point because I get to this point too, and I'm thinking, crap, I don't want to ruin this and at this point, I could ruin it. [LAUGHTER] Let's just hope we don't but I'm going to take some India ink and come in here maybe do a few marks. I just hope I don't hate it. But I do feel like it just needs that little bit of contrast for some reason, I'm not feeling like I got enough dark in there. Now that's fun. Look how that did. I don't feel like I ruined it. [LAUGHTER] I could have come in with some splits that might've been nice. I like that black is different than the words that we have that are black. It's not overwhelming with the other marks because the other marks are that greenish color. They're blending in. Don't be afraid, I know you're like, I did all this work. I don't want to ruin it. If you felt like that was a step where you would have ruined it, then definitely stop until you feel comfortable doing that but I do want a level of contrast in addition to different size pieces of collage element, matt versus shiny color versus neutrals, texture. Things that come off the page also need to have enough contrast so that everything's not blurred all along the same color range. Let's set this to the side and I'll come back and we'll deco the edges when it's dry. [MUSIC] 15. Adding Deckled Edges: [MUSIC] This piece, all the elements are dry. The scalloped globe of glue might not be 100 percent under there, but it's enough for me to definitely do something with this and not ruin it. I'm going to decal the edges. I've just got a metal ruler, and I'm going to show you what that means to decal the edge. [NOISE] You can see, I'm basically tearing the paper, which may or may not work. You got to hold it down and be careful all the way to the end so you don't have a little piece off like that. But if it's at the end, it's probably a piece I'm cutting off of my thing anyway. This is a decaled edge. It's a nice finish torn edge. Depending on if you tear up on the art side, you'll have this edge with that line almost on there. If you flip the art on the back, you'll have a nice clean torn decaled edge, which I actually prefer. But it's hard to tear on the backside of the piece of art and know if you got it in the right place. What I'm going to do, I'm going to give this a try. I've got some needles for sewing some embroidery threads on pieces of art or whatever. These are a little bit larger needles. What I'm going to try to do is just poke a hole through where I want to line my ruler up on the four edges and see if I can get an even set of holes back here to line my ruler up with to tear it in the correct spot. I think I'm going to mark them with [LAUGHTER] the ruler and just see. I've got two inches about right there. I've got about two inches there, so that's pretty nice. Then I've got about an inch there, an inch there. I think I want the decaled edge to be half an inch, say like this half an inch right here. That should give me a nice white border with a decaled edge half inch all the way around, and still have enough to grab to tear with this. I want to come in. I'm at the two. I want to come in about right here. If I do it just outside where I want to be there. I'm going to use this to poke through. Perfect. Probably would've been easier on my cutting mat rather than the hard table. [LAUGHTER] Now, I am just inside the inch and a half line. Let's go ahead and mark that all the way around just inside that inch-and-a-half line. It is worth it to take this moment to get this part pretty exact. This is your finishing element of your piece of art. This is what we're going to be using as marks to tear, so you want to go ahead and take a moment and be exact. This one I want to go inch-and-a-half in too. Let's go ahead. I want it to be the same and with a line right inside that. When I go to tear, I can tear the circle. I'm going to have my ruler just inside of it so it won't be part of the tear. [NOISE] Then here we want these at half an inch so I'm going to come just on this side of the half inch if it's 100 percent exact. lt's probably okay if you're a tiny bit off, but be as careful as you can. I'm going to mark too over here. I used to just eyeball it and mark them. But in another class which you may or may not have seen in the comments, might have been the decaled edge class, actually, somebody mentioned, maybe poke holes through the paper, and then you could tear from the underside without guessing, and I thought, well, that's a great idea. That's what I'm going to show you. Now we got four holes. Our little pin backup. Now, we're ready to flip it over. I want to be just inside the hole so that the hole is cut off. I'm just going to hold the ruler down. The more weight you put on it, the better. [NOISE] If you stand up, you're less likely to have a little rip off at the edge here. There you go. That is how easy making a decaled edge is. Let's take a look at what that looks like. In this way. Look how pretty that is. That edge is so pretty. The art itself is a tiny bit crooked, but as long as our whole piece is straight, you're going to love it when we're done. Let's go ahead and cut the next piece. [NOISE] I'm not trying to get these exactly perfect. I want these little variations. Let's go ahead and cut this piece. This one's very tiny, so I'm just going to grab a little edge and be careful. [NOISE] Then if I end up with a bigger edge here than I wanted, I can very carefully come back and just tear those with my finger after we're done, but I might not mind. Let's just get all four torn and see if we'd like that or not. Let's just see. [NOISE] If you tear towards the ruler, we get less of that large piece left. Now, I do want that side to be a little bit more like this side so I'm going to come back over here and put the ruler on it so I don't accidentally pull anything I didn't mean to. I'm just going to tear that edge a little tighter. If you end up with something bigger than you thought, not a big deal, we just fixed it. Now, let's flip our piece over. Look how good that looks. Now, if we mudded this in a color, sitting it say on top of a teal like I did that piece that we originally looked at, how pretty would that be? Mudded on top of something and framed. Look how beautiful that is. Oh, my goodness. Now, I want to go get this piece to the framer. [LAUGHTER] If you end up with a piece where your dots still show, that's not a big deal either. You could come back through with your ruler and just tear a little piece extra if we needed to. I apparently didn't line that very good. Look my dots are there. But I could come back through. As long as I was tearing down, I could still tear a piece off of here and we could get those dots out of there. I left a little extra piece. Let's just tear down. There we go. [NOISE] Everything you do is fixable. If you have a dot leftover, tear down at the dot, and just create that little decal. Now, we've got all of our dots. I got a dot here. [LAUGHTER] That's the pin dot where I went through. But there we go. Now we've got those dots off. This is the way I think is up. My framer happened to mention on the piece that I was just showing you, I think it's upside down. [LAUGHTER] It's just like it's an abstract piece. How can it be upside down? In my mind, this is up. But when we framed it, this is how it got framed. I can certainly have her go change it. But because it's an abstract piece, it doesn't really matter, not really. But in my mind this way is up. She mentioned to me that most people sign their art. [LAUGHTER] [NOISE] I don't necessarily always sign my art on something like this. But if it's a piece I'm going to take to the framer, I do know now to sign the art sign it in pencil, and then sign your name and maybe a date in the lower right corner. Then your framer will then know which way was up, in which way was down, and there won't be any confusion when you get it, and you think, I think that should have gone the other way. [LAUGHTER] What I like about collage is we can flip this around and say, I like this better or I like this better or, l like this better. It just depends. In my mind, this is up, but this could be up. It looks great. This could be up. Which one did you like the best? I wish there was like a little vote button, and then I could see which corner I needed to sign. [LAUGHTER] I hope you have fun giving this a try out. I definitely want you to try decaled edges. You could tear your piece of paper first. Like if we had this piece of paper, we could decal the edges first and then have a piece already fixed, ready to put art on. But I feel like that's a limiting to me. It's closing me into a specific box like the sketch book closes you into a specific page piece here. If you have a little bigger piece of paper that you're working with, you can be a little freer and then cut around it. That's why I chose to do it that way so that it wasn't hemmed into a space that I then thought, crap, I messed it up. I didn't get it in the right proportion or I didn't get everything just right. Now, I can trim the paper around wherever my finished piece of art was and it's trimmed out with a perfect edge instead of something where it shouldn't have been. Just my own personal preference. I hope you enjoy this project. I can't wait to see your pieces. I'll see you back in class. [MUSIC] 16. Working With Cradled A Board: Thought it would be fun if we did a project on cradled board so we can get a feel with how that works and how we could finish it. You can collage right on cradle board and get your piece if you want, you could do rule of thirds where you have a horizon line and do different things out there. I personally don't like being conformed to a square to create my different pieces of art. I know on the last piece we created within a larger square, but my piece wasn't exactly even on all the edges. I had whitespace leftover. There wasn't a spot where I had a hard stop and I was like, "Crap, maybe I didn't get the things in the right place where I wanted." I thought it would be fun to try something a little different, but within the realm of how I like to do stuff. I thought maybe instead of gluing directly to the square for our piece. So many times I've done that and I felt like it was a piece of crap and I was unhappy and I would throw it away or I don't think I would mess something up. Instead of doing that, because usually when I'm working on cradle board, that's a piece I want to savor and hang and use that, hang it up on the wall as part of a gallery wall back behind me. But when you do a piece and you're like, "Well, that's ruined. I guess I'll just throw it away and I wasted that money on a board," or something like that. It's very discouraging and has left me at my table mad more times than I care to admit. I thought we could do this my favorite way, which is create a big collage piece and cut out the part of it that works the best for us and glue it on our board, ready to hang and finish. That is the way I'm going to do this project. You can glue right down on your board if you're feeling comfortable and you like to do that, you don't want to glue directly on the board. Make sure you prime the board first. I prime it with gesso. I will be priming this board. Then I do personally go ahead and paint the sides. I like charcoal gray, but you can paint on a color from your collage. If you're collaging on the board, you can collage down the sides. You could paint them black, white, gray, or pick a color from your piece, your choice. But I'm going to prime the board. I have that sent to the side. We'll need it last. I'm going to create a big, messy whatever here on my paper and just glue and draw and have some fun. We'll pick the best composition out of that to use. Got my glue ready. You could do matte medium, you could do Mod Podge. Mod Podge might be nice, but I do like the paste. Now what I like about working this way, instead of how we were working on the littler pieces is I could come through and put great big pieces. I'm just going to try to get a little color in my mind here, but we don't even have to stick to a color range. We can go through and mix colors and then be surprised when we're done. If I wanted to do this on one side and maybe when we're done, we like that little element of surprise and collage that we end up with. I like this weirdo little piece of art that I never did anything with. I love the texture of this. I just have my big pile of pieces of art that I've created over here. I do like things with holes cut out of it. You got to be real careful that you're not getting art everywhere, but it's less important on this, we're covering the whole thing. Then I'm doing blue. Do I want pops of orange? Maybe I do want pops of orange. I just love this. Does that not look like the most perfect bookmark? You could do something at this point that you never thought you would do. Let's just go ahead. Let's just start gluing stuff. Are you sure you like that piece of paper there? Something this big, the matte medium might be easier to work with. I like to paste. It didn't matter if I get a little bit of glue on the paper because we're covering all the surfaces of the paper. Then I'm going to just work haphazardly. I'm not thinking about composition, I'm not thinking about, did I get that in the right place? Do I like what it's doing? I really like working in this way because it's more organic, fits in with the way I like to create a little more serendipitous there with what we end up with. I love that. Because what we're going to do is then find the piece out here that we liked best, more than one. If you are working on a big enough piece of paper and you feel like you got more than one piece out of there possibly. Then we'll add elements to it, we'll add art mixtures and elements to our piece. Of course I've got my little card here. Just help me spread out. If you've got stuff that you'll smear, put a piece of wax paper on there to do that. Let's just go ahead. Work in this postcard. A lot of times I will make a bunch of art thinking about what's my next idea for whatever class or project that I want to do. Then I have plenty of things like this piece of art leftover that just didn't come together for me and create anything that I thought would work or that inspired me. I'm really looking for the pieces that inspire me. If I create a piece of collage, I'm like, "This is what I'm going to do." That's the feeling that I'm looking for. Something that gets created. Then I get excited. Then I'm like, "Okay, I got my next idea." Really liked this stuff. Let's go ahead and just claim a piece of this. Maybe I'll try to stick down with a glue stick. Don't be afraid to mix your glues. You don't have to use all the same glue throughout the whole piece. If you think lighter pieces work better with matte medium and heavier pieces work better with yes paste, then mix up your glues. Not a big deal. I mean, if you're doing jump pieces, you could even use like Elmer's glue if you wanted. Just depends on what your goal is. My goal on these is to have something to hang up when I'm done. Got some blue in there. Let's see. Now, I want to keep on adding. We don't want to stop there. Let's see, what do we want to add? I do like this piece here. I'll go ahead. This is just some black and white paint and some marks. I made some collage materials. You can spend whole days just making collage materials, which pretty fine. I've got glue on the fingers, let me just get a baby wipe. I love having baby wipes handy as I'm working. You can just write off any art medium in any glue that you stuck on your hands, so you're tearing your new piece you're not sticking to it. You can spend whole day just creating collage materials. I've seen lots of artists on Instagram doing exactly that. Let's put that right there. Now you just have collage element days. I love that idea. Just sit here, make pretty things, collect them in your basket so that when you get to the day that you're ready to create some collage, you have options. That's what collage is all about, options. I got that. Stick that in here. I love having options because at the point that you're creating, you don't want to get stuck and think, Oh crap, I need to go make something or what other element I have nothing to work with. I like options. I like that piece there. We could come in and draw on this and see where that gets us for a moment too. Try not to leave my glue open too long. I do like this little pop of weirdness here. That's fun with the little half circles still on it. Let's just stick that down. We're not judging it right now. Right now we're just seeing where the flow takes us. Now when we're all done. We might think differently about that, Like why do we put that there? But at this moment it's more about the process and having some fun. It's not necessarily about perfect composition and perfect placement and perfect pieces. We're just going to try to see. The reason why I like working this way is maybe I will create something that I never would have created any other way. My piece are fun, let's go for that. When I'm laying stuff like this, I'm also keeping in mind one of the composition elements that I was talking about, repeating elements. If I put down a big swath of green, maybe, I want a big swath of green somewhere else, maybe not just in one place. I don't have the paper a 100 percent covered, but I do have quite a bit on it. We made now come back and add some art elements. You don't have to have paper on the entire thing. I do like doing that, but it doesn't have to be that. But we can come back through now and start adding other elements. Maybe, I want some India ink marks. Let's go ahead. What was that? There we go. Let's get that over there. We can come back and mark make after we get our collage piece cut out too. We can add elements there if we want. Maybe, we want some dots, white dots. Maybe I want some crayon, maybe I want some pastel. You got to be careful working with pastels though. That stuff is messy. Because I already had some pastel on these pieces of art that aren't sealed down, so I got color all over my fingers already. We can keep adding, but let's just start and take a look at what we got. I'm going to grab a piece of paper with a hole cut out of it. I'm going to use my wood piece to cut a hole out of the piece of paper. Then we can use it like a viewfinder and decide which part of this really works the best for us. I'll be right back. 17. Cutting Out And Finishing Up: All right. Our piece, well, it still has some wet ink on it, so we'll be careful. But I have cut out a little window, the size of my board. I just put it on a cutting mat and cut around the board so the size was exact. Now I can go around this piece of paper and depending on how big the paper is, you may even get two collages out of it. I think it's really fun to go really big, paint collage, whatever on top of it. Then come through and see how many things we can cut out that look amazing. I can tell you a certainty I know you're going to use more collage paper and stuff in doing that. But I don't care. Because I can tell you with a 100 percent certainty, I'm going to get something I like every single time doing it this way and doing it the other way, I can almost guarantee you 98 percent of the time I'm going to be angry and leave my table mad. I'm really loving that right there. I'm looking up in the little camera viewfinder so that I can judge what we've got going. I really love this right here. Look at that. That just saying to me like I love that. I'm looking up in that viewfinder and I know this is what I want. At this point, I actually want to cut this a little bit larger. I have my board right over here. It's still a tiny bit wet, but I went ahead and coated it with Gesso and I painted the sides gray because I was trying to pull just something neutral out of here. I'm setting it up here. I want to cut it a tiny bit larger than the board because I want my art to overhang the board. Then I'm going to use an exact dough knife to get it exactly cut on the board. Because if I cut this out exactly, and it's even a smidgen off, that's going to suck. What I'm going to do, we've got more scissors over here, and I'm going to judge a little bit on the outside of this and cut this up. You know what's nice about having these cutout pieces? Now you have a collage element for something else. We've now created some more fun collage pieces to use later. Yes, I liked it right there. Let's just come outside of that. Cut that a little bit larger. I know you guys think I'm crazy, but that's okay. Art is supposed to be fun. I want you to have some more fun with it. This is what does it for me. This is how I have more fun with it. This is how I get past those blocks. Pass being mad about not creating anything good at my table, which has happened many, many, many times. There's been years when I wanted to sit down and create a masterpiece and nothing came out of me, and I was just so mad that it worked out that way. I'm going to put a little mark right there so I know where that is and I cut outside of that. Look how good that looks, just right there. Oh my goodness. This is the excitement that I go for when I'm cutting up pieces art. This is why I love to cut up art. Now, look at these collage pieces you have for later. Beautiful pieces. Save all these pieces because you can use these as elements and things later. I love this piece with this extra texture and height on it because we had that edge of that on there. I love that. Look how pretty that is. This just makes my day. Now, this is a little bigger than our board which is still wet. That's okay. I can come back and touch up the sides with my little bit of silver paint. I'm just using craft paint for that from the **** Blick and I picked a shiny silver, so this is the silver metallic, I love metallics. But if we flip it over, you can see that my piece art is slightly bigger than my board. To be honest, we might have to just leave it right there and glue it down because I'm just centering it wherever I had it. You can get more exact if you want, but pretty good if I just do this. I'm going to put glue on this board and we're going to stick this baby down. I already know I'm going to love this piece because I loved it cut out. Makes my day when I can create something, especially when I can create something on camera for you, and it ends up beautiful, and then hopefully you see how inspiring it is to come and sit at your table and enjoy the process more. It's not like I'm sitting down to create a masterpiece. I'm not that kind of art creator. I'm a little bit more in the serendipitous kind of, what can I create? Then I surprise myself with how good it came out when we're done. Because then I get excited. I like hanging the stuff on my walls. I'm not an artist that wants to sell all my art. That's not my goal. My goal is to make workshops basically. Because then I have given myself permission. I'm not one of those people that sits and does things for the fun of it. A lot of times I need a goal. If you're one of those people, and you're sitting at your table and you're thinking, what's the point? What am I going to do with this? Give yourself a goal. My goal is to think of yummy things for workshops. Your goal could be good enough work together to be in a gallery. That's a really great goal. A friend of mine, that's her goal and she creates photography. She's looking for pieces to create that she could put in the gallery that she's in. That's a fantastic goal because now you're out there creating with a purpose, you're creating art that you never would've created otherwise, you're thinking up things that maybe you wouldn't have thought of. You have projects that you never would've done. I like having a goal and doing a workshop gives me the goal to deep dive into a project, learn all the ins and out, figure out different ways to do things, work on different materials. Here we have this nice and glued down. You can take something like your credit card. Now notice I have a piece of wax paper, and in this case, I actually have this newsprint because we're mostly dry on there. Even if your glue is still wet, use that wax paper instead of a regular paper, but I know we're dry because I did some stuff in between glue and then doing. I just want to make sure all the edges and everything is tagged down. Look how pretty that even looks like right there. So beautiful. Now I want to let that, yes, paste. This is a very thick piece of paper. In something like that, I do want to use a thicker glue. If it's YES paste, that's great. If it's real heavy, matte medium, that's fine. Heavy Mod Podge, that's fine. I probably wouldn't use just the matte medium. It's very light and liquidy, so I wouldn't use that to glue down this multilayered paper piece. A little bit heavier glue. I wouldn't just use a glue stick either probably because it's a lot of paper, but you do want to glue it down and then let that sit for a minute. You don't want to immediately cut because right now I can still move this piece of paper around, and so it wouldn't actually stay put. I might cut this side and then I might cut this side and I might cut this side and, oops, it's too short because it shifted on me and I didn't realize. Do that cutting in a minute. Let this dry. I'm just so excited every time I turn it over and look at it. It's just perfect. You saw how haphazardly we just threw stuff down. We weren't thinking about composition, we weren't thinking about trying to cover every surface. We weren't thinking about making it perfect. But now that we're done, as I was visually viewing this, I was thinking rule of thirds, and so you can very clearly see I've broken this up into three parts basically. This piece here cuts it off at a horizon line and you have 1/3 up here, 2/3 down here. We have a little bit of dark in here, and with our little mark-making, so I feel like we have the light, we have the dark, so we have the pops of contrast. Look at everything that we got out of there. That was so much easier than trying to place all that in a perfect place on that board. This is the best one I've ever done. [inaudible] my art table, and that's what I think. This is the best I've ever done. We have let that dry. We're going to, for the sake of the filming, pretend that I left and ate lunch and came back so that it was good and dry. I'm going to take a nice very sharp X-ACTO knife to cut this. You got to be real careful. Let's just pray that we don't move anything. I don't want to ruin my very perfect piece here. Very sharp X-ACTO knife with a brand new blade. I'm going to work this direction, turn my piece of art, work this direction because I have tried to go this way and this way without moving my piece, and the piece of artwork has shifted, I'll cut things crooked. I cut a piece of my board one time. I have found it if I would just press down very hard and just pull the knife down, we're working with multiple layers here, so you may have to do more than one swipe, and then pull that piece of paper away, I will have a perfect finish. Now I want to move the board. I don't want to move my body. I want to move the board, hold it down, do a swipe, come back, do another swipe. Then I'll tell you a secret too. If let's say you cut one tiny piece off to the point where you didn't really intend or shifted on you, what do I got on there that's so thick and heavy? There we go. You could come back with whatever this side paint is and touch up a piece if you had to. Look at how beautiful that is. I know. I sound like a nut, but I just get so excited when things work out. They're beautiful and I love them, and that one didn't cut straight. Shocks. We're just going to come back real tight on the board. If you cut a piece of board, it's not a huge deal, we can come back and touch up our paint. Let's just see what we did there. Oh yeah, see, there we go. That still looks great. Just got to be careful. This might be harder in your opinion than just gluing down on the board. You just got to decide for yourself what works best for you. What's going to make you happy while you're sitting at your art table creating. How are you going to walk up? How are you going to finish and get up with a piece of art that you love? For me, this is how I'm going to get up with a piece of art that I love. Look. Oh my goodness. It's so beautiful. Whether you agree or disagree is not really the point. Art is very subjective. It's what you love when you get up that matters. I love this. Then I can come back and touch up my gray paint now that I have got that glued down and finished, and then we'll be all finished and set. I already have the paint out here. I'm just going to come back and do, with my little paintbrush, just touch up all the edge now that we've got it cut. I did cut my piece of board one spot, so I'm going to touch that up with gray paint, and then this is done and ready to hang. Look how beautiful that is. Here's my recommendation on the boards. Do your piece like this and glue it on a board, but you're certainly welcome to work straight on the board if you're feeling comfortable about that also. This just happens to be my own personal preference and a way that I wanted to show you that you could end up with a piece that you love instead of a piece that you hate and you want to throw away because if we had hated this and nothing worked out on that piece of paper, I could have thrown it to the side to be more collage materials, but because I found a piece in that bigger piece that I really truly loved, it was perfect to cut out and then worth mounting and spending the money for a cradled board, in my opinion. That's the way that I get around creating stuff that I hate and then feeling like I need to throw a board or a piece of canvas away. I like to create on paper. I like to cut the part out that I love and then mount it, ready to hang or sale or whatever on the finished piece that I want it to be. Then to finish this completely, once I paint the sides again, I would go outside and give it a coat or two. Probably a spray this way, let it dry a minute in-between coatings. I'd probably coat this three times with my UV Archival matte spray. It won't change the color, it won't make it shiny, but it will secure down any of the pastels are the art supplies or the mediums that I have that could be ruined if somebody touched it or got it wet, and it will also protect it for future. When you got a hanging in your house and dust sits on it, you could go through and dust that off and not ruin your piece of art. Always consider, in the end, what's the end-use of this and do you need to finish it? I would use an Archival matte finishing spray to finish this off before I sold it or hung it up for something on my gallery wall. Hope you enjoyed this project and I'll see you back in class. 18. Micro Collage Collection: Let's take a look at doing a little series. Thought it'd be fun to do just a set of small abstracts that all flow together but don't necessarily look exactly like each other. I think what I'm going to do is I've got some paper that's from choosing keeping that's already cut into a square. It's like a six by six square with a deck old edge on it. But also took some watercolor paper as a six by six and tore my own deck old edge, just like I did in project earlier, where we just tore the edge off so we could do it either way. I like the pre-cut pieces because convenient. But this was very easy to create. I thought what we might do is create a big cut up by abstract, like we did in the cradle board project because I surely love making those. Then all what we could do with that is cut the pieces into some little three by three abstracts that we can then mount to paper and then this whole piece would be ready to do something with. Then we would have hopefully at least three, possibly six that we got out of that was really cool. We can be real strategic about it, and we can have a little three by three window if we wanted. I can make a smaller one of these. This is from the earlier project, but we could go through and actually draw out each one that we want and cut it. Or we could just cut it in pieces and just see what we get. We can definitely do either way. What I want to do is I have some previous art that I've made in one of the workshops. These are the leftover pieces. I thought this color way is a little bit out of my comfort zone. It's not one that I go towards. It's purple and yellow and purple is not really my thing. But I thought the fun of projects like this is exactly that step outside your comfort zone and learn something new and create something that you never would've created, just sticking with the same old. These are the little scraps I pulled out. May have some more scraps in my little scrap bin, I don't know, but let's see if we can make our little scraps. Here work. I liked that they're circles cut out of it already because as we've talked about in other segments, I do like little circle cutouts. I had this bright orange piece that I had originally thought I might try, but I think I'm not going to do that, I think I'm going to do these. I pulled out a handmade piece of paper that I got at the art store that was really beautiful. That could be our dark contrast piece. I also have this piece that I painted on, a piece of tracing paper, tissue paper, wax paper or whatever it is that you have, that's the semi transparent paper. I got that piece that is in this color way. It's a piece that I did on a previous day when I was randomly just creating collage elements. Also got teabag, got a old piece of paper. I got some tissue paper that I've put watercolor paint on and let dry. Also pulled a piece of orange, but I think that I pulled that when I was thinking orange. I'm not sure that's going to be the one that makes it in. I'm almost thinking I need like this yellow. I don't know if I made one of these in yellow. Let's just take a look at our paper choices. I do like just cutting a big piece of watercolor paper into strips and then just painting it a color because then we have something to rip up and use. Look at that one. I actually liked that. Weirdly enough, this color is in here and I can get away with it. I painted these thinking, what a fun, unusual little color combos. Why not? Let's use them here. You can see at this is acrylic paint, painted on this watercolor papers. I did watercolor on some of these, I did acrylic paint on some of these, let's go for that. Then I've got some of this stuff that might be nice, store some of that in there. Just like with the one that we just did in the other project, the one with the cradled board, I'm glue all these down randomly, and then we will cut these out. I'm going to probably speed this up as I glue these down. But you already watched me do the glue down in one of the other segments, so don't feel so bad to speedup. I will make you sit through the whole thing. I'm going to go ahead and use the Yes Paste because that's my favorite. Pick your favorite and go for it. This piece of paper has cool stuff on both sides. I used to not want to use old paper because I never was going to get something that I liked anyway, so why waste that piece of paper? That was true for a long time because that's when I would sit down with a square piece of something and try to create within those bounds, and then leave my art table mad because whatever it was didn't end up like I wanted it or like I imagined or like I hoped. Then I was like, "Well, I ruined that piece of paper." I got away from using real vintage stuff, but some of these came in little scrap packs I found at a booth at the antique market. They were cheap, so I don't feel so bad about it. Now, when I do pieces of art, let's put this on the side, what we're doing, I always get stuff I like, and so now I don't feel so bad using an old piece of paper. But if you just can't bring yourself to do it, then you should make a copy of this old piece of paper and save the original and use the copy. No sense. Then you can use that same supply over and over. I'm being random here. I'm not trying to get exact at this point, I just want to fill the page with interesting things and then see what we can cut out of that. I like that because it takes the pressure off of making the stuff. Takes all that pressure off. Let's just put that right there. How about that? When I get less pressure at the art table, I'm a much happier camper creating. I love what I end up with, so I like these no pressure techniques. I have glued down a lot of stuff. It's a little further than it was a moment ago, but that's all I've done. It's still wet. I just glued stuff haphazardly everywhere. Then I was trying to keep in mind if I cut a little piece out of each area, did I have any repetition? Am I going to have enough bits that I could cut out and say I have a collection? At the moment, maybe, maybe not. Like I might need to come over here and put another one of these in there. I think I will now that I've thought of that. But I also want to take this moment to then come up with my art supplies that I want to throw in here also, so I'll glue that one down in a second. But I might want to come in here with the neo color crayons and do some extra mark-making and pull some of this together with my marks like this. This is sienna, raw sienna, ain't it pretty, which is kind of like this yellow ocher. Of course, I think it's pretty I'll just draw some of that, I might come in here, I've got a lavender, got a bunch more colors too, but these just happened to be this is color pink. But it looks more lavender. These are just some that I happened to have out in a little container here. Not only can we do scribbles, we can come in and do some mark-making. Now keep in mind too that neo color crayons are water-soluble. If you're using any type of water-soluble crayon or something like this, we could come in and strategically with a wet paintbrush, we could come in at this point and smear some of this and blend it in and make it more of a watercolor in there. I could do that with that yellow smear a little bit, which is fine. It just is another way to use this medium. I like water-soluble things. I could also come back with my black magic India ink. We could throw some really dark contrasty spots in here. Keep in mind again, at this point we're not thinking composition. We're not thinking about where stuff's really going formally. We are playing and experimenting and mark-making and throwing stuff in and doing some things that we wouldn't normally do because we can. We are not trying to create a masterpiece yet. We're trying to just create some yumminess. Let me glue this down before I forget. Then once we've got this glue down, we've got a bunch of yummy marks. I'm not done mark-making yet, but I'm going to forget this isn't attached. Once we get this glued down and wet ink supplies and stuff everywhere, we'll have to let this completely dry. This would be like one of those things where you could go ahead and do part of the project today, maybe leave it overnight or go fits in the morning, maybe going lunch, and then come back before we try to evaluate and cut this up. I really like three-dimensional papers. If you ever go to the art store and you can find any papers that are like three-dimensional, wrinkled like this has got free wrinkles in it. The one that we used on that other project was real thin and had little holes all the way through it. If you ever find that dimensional paper, grab a piece, you won't regret that. They make the most interesting extra element in something like a collage and it makes me want to go downtown to the big art store where I know they have all these yummy papers and buy some more just to put in my stash because I like to come back and use them. The other thing that I love to do some mark-making is my paint pen. We might as well throw some of that in, maybe some dots. It's these little extra elements, the little extra details that really make the most fabulous pieces. Don't skimp out on the details. Have enough little collage papers filling things up, and then come back in and fill in some holes and spots and areas with scribble, color, dots, marks, lines. Let's see where to put this. Try not to put my hand in that ink that had plotted down that I know is not dry. Again with the marks and the dots and things I'm looking at repeating elements. Do I have in enough places where if I cut something out, Would that be an element in our little finished piece? I don't know. We'll see. I don't usually add too much to my little art pieces because we already did all that work on those when we created that original piece of art. But you can just judge what you want to do there. I also have pastels that I like to use, sometimes soft pastels, but if you add soft pastels to something like this, spray it with a fixative spray before we come back to cut it up so that we don't end up with powder everywhere. But why don't we just come on in here and throw some little marks and stuff just because like I said, lavender and purple a little bit outside my comfort zone? That's fun to sometimes just play outside of an area that you're not comfortable with. All right. Now I'm going to let this dry and then we will cut out little pieces. Then if we need any additional marks after that, we can do it at that time. But I'm going to stop for the moment and let all this dry, all these glued areas go ahead and get stuck. I feel like this one is just not glued very well. While all these get stuck down, then we'll come back and cut this up and see what we get. 19. Cutting Out Pieces & Finishing: [MUSIC] This is dry. I have cut out a little square that is roughly three by three, and I say roughly because it is rough. [LAUGHTER] I need to make up, I don't know more exact square. I like it when I have my little cradle boards that I can use as a template almost because they are exact but this close. This is the size square that I'm hoping to end up with on these little pieces, and this is the six by six with a pretty torn edge that I'm hoping our piece can be mounted right in the middle of and could be our micro, wonderful, yummy piece of art. I thought about just doing the cutoffs. But that just doesn't appeal to me as much as searching out a yummy composition out of all the fun bits that we have. Look at that one there. This one very much appeals to my rule of thirds, feel. I've got a third, a third, a third, and then cuts here at the bottom third, and I like all the fun elements and things that are drawn in there. Also, let's see what else. This is fun with this yellow here on this bold on this side, and it a third, third, third, and there's something on this third, also filling. Something like right in here. I like this because I've still got third, third, third, we've broken up. We've got the holes in there. I probably would cut that one little piece of this straggler if I cut that piece out. Now I got to remember what I said. Let's go ahead and say yes to this. I'm just going to very lightly draw with a pencil on here, and that'll be what I cut. I can see about where that is. Then, I do really like this one. I like that this piece will be in there and that piece is in there. That pulls me in with the repeating element, and definitely makes me feel like, they're part of the same series. I'm filling that one up there too, but let's cut these two out and see what's left. My goal is to have three. Three when we're done, that's my goal. [NOISE] I'm just cutting with scissors and I'm sure there are lots of different ways we could do this, but because this is so thick, I'm just going to do my best cutting it with the scissors and pull that little piece off. Here's my scissor line. Because sometimes, I could have put this on top here too to guide me if I lost my way. [LAUGHTER] Let's see what we got. I love that. How beautiful is that piece. I think I love it many ways actually. [LAUGHTER] When we mount this, if we have a deck old edge on the bottom, just tear the edge of your watercolor paper, so one edge is tore. We can mount these with square edges, or if you happen to have a corner cutter, then we could cut the corners. I have a couple of corner cutters. One of them has scalloped edge, coupled with liaise edges. Sometimes just the rounded edge is nice. Basically, what we would do is clip that edge for a finished edge rather than a square edge, which is fun. If you think you'd like an edge on that instead of being square, we could cut those edges off, or you could just leave it square. Which is also very interesting, and I would basically take some of my glue and glue that right down in the center of this. Let's go ahead and say, that's a winner. [LAUGHTER] Again, any pieces you cut off, keep that for collaged pieces. Look how amazing that that pieces. We've also got this one here that we've already said okay too. I'm going to go ahead and cut across on that. I just overcut my line. Let us go ahead and come over. I might not have one leftover. It just really depends. Let's cut off this little tighter so that we're actually on our pencil edge nail. If you end up with at least two, yeah, my goal is three. [NOISE] Here's a line here that I can see. These leftover pieces are working super-duper, yummy. Let's take our little edge here, so I get the third side. Here we go. Look at that one. [LAUGHTER] Oh my gosh. Oh my goodness. Look at that one. Might be my favorite one ever. [LAUGHTER] Look how these are as a little set. Let's just see. Look at these yummy leftover collaged pieces that we can use later in something else that's fun. [NOISE] I don't want to get these dirty, let's sit these over here. I liked this bit with the yellow. See right in there, I'm filling that. [LAUGHTER] Are you loving the little Southern accent I've got going on there. [LAUGHTER] Can you tell him from the South? [LAUGHTER] What do you think about that one right there? I think I'm thinking of this one. [LAUGHTER] Let's commit to it. Where did my scissors go? It looks like this is the piece we just cut off. We could maybe, look at that right there. Oh, there you go. I'm filling that with the circle in it. I feel like we've got another piece, and I'm almost felling like this could be another piece. Let's cut this out. I was starting to doubt, certainly think, are we even going to get three? I'm not on my pencil lines, so I'm going to trim a tiny bit of that. [NOISE] That's a thick piece. If you get it where you think, oh, I didn't get the pencil line and you think it's safe, you could take your art eraser, which we know I love my little rubbery art eraser, and erase a little piece of line if you needed to without it getting into your art supplies. I have a little piece of line there, and then, you'd be good to go. Let's check it out. Look at that. I'm feeling excited. Look at those. Oh my goodness. This one I'm really loving. Let's put this to the side for a moment. This, I'm really loving this with this little circle on it. Do we want the circle cut off or do we want to include the whole circle? I feeling like I can include the circle. That's what we're going to do. Oh my goodness, this is even better than I hoped. [LAUGHTER] I can't tell you how good it feels when you sit down to film something, and everything works out the way you want, versus when you film half a workshop and you're like, nothing is working, let's just scrap this, which I have done. I have done that. [LAUGHTER] Sometimes nothing works, and sometimes everything comes together and you're like, this was its moment. Look at that. Let me get another piece of paper already got cut over here. Oh my goodness. Almost. I don't know. Am I liking it with the circle somewhere else, I feel like I'm liking it right there. I like it because this one the circles are on the side, this one the circles are in the middle, this one the circles at the bottom, this one doesn't have a circle, but that's okay. Still amazing. [LAUGHTER] Let's see, is there one more in here? Let's just see, do we like this enough, are we fill in it. That's fun in the middle, but I don't know that this is my favorite. Maybe if we cut it over there and let the yellow. I am filling that with off to the side and the yellow. I was about to say let's scrap it, but let's just go for it. [LAUGHTER] Look at that. Oh my goodness. I do like this one. The whole is in a different spot than it is on all the other ones. Look at that. Got a little series of five out of here. This first one is definitely my yummy, yummy favorite. That too much stuff on my art table. But, look at that collection that we just created out of a great big mess. We've created five miniature pieces of art, that I'm just going to take the yes paste and glue in the middle of my paper, and call that my set. Look how beautiful those are. These are amazing. Let's just take a look at each one. Look how pretty that is. I'm loving that. The only thing about that one is there is no circle in it, but that's okay. I do like the colors. I think this one could be my favorite. It is very pretty. [LAUGHTER] This I would probably float frame, since I went to the effort to have a decored edge, you could float frame this. Look how pretty that one is. This was a fun set. I definitely want to see you my quantities where you have little three by threes mounted in a piece of paper, and just show me what you came up with, what colors you picked, what marks you made. Favorite, a little foursome. I definitely want to have these framed and hanging somewhere [LAUGHTER]. Before I glue them down, I will make sure that I don't have any marks on my white pieces of paper from anything I might've had on my fingers. I want them to be crisp and clean. I would definitely spray this with some finishing spray before I glue them down. I want to spray these with some finishing spray. Again, I'll take these outsides, and spray them with my archival matte, finish spray, varnish. I'm going to vanish those four, then once they're dry, I'm going to glue them down with my yes paste, and we'll call those, a collection. I hope you have fun with this project. I can't wait to see your little mini collection of micro collages, and I'll see you back in class. [MUSIC] 20. Final Thoughts: [MUSIC] What did you think? I was so excited to have you here. I hope you enjoy creating a little bit larger pieces that you then cut pieces out of. That's my own personal favorite way to create. I do it with painting, I do it with watercolor, I do it with collage. It really takes a lot of the pressure off to create that way because I'm not constricted to a box thinking, what am I going to create today? Then I start creating and I'm like, "Oh, I've already messed up. I'm just going to throw this away." I don't get stuck in those things that stop me from creating my best, highest work. If I'll create a great big piece, just having fun haphazardly putting stuff in and making and playing with color and then come back and search out that amazing piece within that larger piece, I end up with stuff I love every single time. Hundred percent of the time, I guarantee you, you will make things that you love. But if you're more of the go ahead and create on that constrained parameter's piece and you do good work that way, then that's fantastic. Every one of us works a little different. You just have to figure out what works for you. That's going to give you pieces that you love, give you enjoyment of creating. Because I guarantee you if you enjoy creating and the pieces get you excited like this one is so beautiful. Every time I look at it, I get super excited. I want to make some more collage. If you create pieces that get you that excited, you will come back up here and work and practice and play a lot more. I hope you enjoyed some of these techniques. I hope you're going to have lots of little scraps in your bin ready to create that you've been saving and you're like, "What am I going to do with these?" [LAUGHTER] I was super glad to have you here. I'm looking forward to what you create. Please, make some fun things and come back and share them. It really makes my day to see the work that you created. I will see you next time [MUSIC]