Halloween Mixed Media Collage Cake

1. Introduction: Hi. My name is Elizabeth and welcome to my Halloween Mixed Media collage cake class. I'm a professionally trained artist and art educator, and I've been teaching here on Skillshare since 2021, sharing a variety of different art techniques and processes, exploring a whole range of media. And I have an artist inspired series that you might enjoy checking out if you enjoy this class. If it's your first time joining me on Skillshare for an art class. I am super excited about this one because I love the spooky season and all the fun ways that we can explore Halloween and all themes Autumn and October in our artwork. And in this class, we are going to be making a very fun mixed media collage cake. So what we're going to do is we are going to dig through our collage stash, pull out some fantastic papers. I love creating decorative papers. So I'm going to be using papers that I have created using various watercolor and ink techniques. But you are more than welcome to create new papers for this class project or just use any fun Halloween color scheme vibe papers that you want to work with. Then after we have done that, we are going to collage in some frosting to just give it a little extra. And then you're going to see how I decide to create my topper for my Halloween inspired cake, and then I'm going to lean into mixed media. So I'm going to work back into my collage cake with colored pencil, fine liners, add some more spooky elements, and really start to bring out those halloween vibes with the mixed media details and really kind of enhance a lot of what's already going on with my collage papers. This is a really fun class. It explores some art processes that maybe we've done together in some of my other classes, but in a fun new festive Halloween sort of way. So I hope you're gonna join me in class as we explore mixed media collage doing Halloween cakes. See in class. 2. Class Project: For our last project, we are going to be exploring mixed media collage techniques as we play around with the colors associated with Halloween in the spooky season. So leaning into blacks, grays, whites, oranges, yellows, purples, maybe even some greens, and we are going to be digging through our collage papers and our decorative papers that perhaps you create like I do, and pulling out different inspiration papers for our collage. Then we're going to be cutting those up and assembling them into a staffed cake. And then after we get everything glued down, we are going to work back into our cake with a couple of different drawing media. I like to start with colored pencil and then I work back in with fineliner and then add some pops of color with some paint pens because it's always fun to add a little bit of confetti to the background of your cake collages. So let's head it over to our next lesson to talk more about the materials you're going to want to have on hand for class. See you there. 3. Materials: The materials for our class project for Halloween Mixed Media collage cake are very straightforward. We have our different decorative papers. These are watercolor ones that I've done. I have a whole stash of different collage papers that I create and that I can pull from. If you don't have papers, you can absolutely pull any other collage materials that you have. If you want to create some papers, you can check out some of my other classes on how we do that with watercolor. Then because we're collaging, we want to make sure that we have scissors and a glue stick. I always like to have a scrap paper, just a scrap copy paper off to the side just to be my gluing area and another scrap paper that's usually a reused folded over one that I can put down on the paper just to really help get things to adhere by doing some burnishing. For the mixed media part of it, I love to lean into color pencils and fine liner. But you can incorporate any other art supplies you want to have on hand. If you have paint pens, those are also fantastic options. A lot of times I lean into those for some confetti and different texture in the background. If you have different brush pens, I've got some brush pens around, I might use that to enhance and really further push my collage. At drawing materials that you want to play with when you go back into your collage, for the mixed media section of class will be great. Let's head over to the next lesson to get started creating our Halloween cake collages. See you there. 4. Collage: To begin my mixed media collage Halloween cake, I first start by choosing a background. I love creating decorative watercolor backgrounds, so I do a bunch of different watercolor techniques on large sheets of watercolor and mixed media paper, usually using Canson, and I will tape it down so I can do the maximum amount of, you know, really going at it with techniques to get some really fun effects. So I'll create these giant sheets of paper and then set those aside to dry and then pull them for different projects like this one. So here I'm leaning into some papers that I have that fall into the more Halloween color scheme. So oranges, yellows, blacks, whites, and grays, you know, you could really go with any colors you want here. I'm using some papers that I've had around for a long time. The one that I chose to do for the flooring or the table, the base at the bottom is actually an etching print that I had done in college. So you just really never know when you're going to find life for your papers. It's fun to just have a large stash around. If you're interested in creating decorative papers like this, I do have another class where you can check that out, and I'll link it in the notes. But it's really fun to do different watercolor techniques on a large scale instead of doing them for a specific painting. I do have a standard setup when I'm doing my mixed media collages. I've got my papers that I'm working from, my scissors, my glue, and then I always have a scrap piece of copy paper off to the side. That way, all of the stickiness application for your adhesive happens on that scrap paper, and then you can just move the glued piece over to the artwork that you're working on. And then I have an extra piece of scrap paper that's quite often usually a folded up reused piece from a previous gluing session that I can put down on top of it and kind of push down and brayer it, or I'll flip it over to kind of really make sure that my glues are sticking. Oftentimes, mixed media paper or watercolor paper is on the thicker side, so you really kind of need to give it a little extra adhesion pressure when you're getting your pieces to stick. It's nice to have a whole selection of colors to pull from. I would love to say that I have all of my papers organized in a rainbow, but that would be um, you know, future future goals. When I'm doing a piece like this, I like to do a play of cut paper and torn paper. A lot of it'll depend on what the mixed media collage imagery is going to become. But it really starts with a base layer in the background and then just starting to build up some basic shapes, much like you do in drawing, you know, kind of starting with some of those big shapes and then gradually refining down to smaller and smaller, more detailed intricate pieces. And so I've got my background. I've got my base layer that I'm building my cake off of, and then I'm doing my cake layers. I really try to be intentional about when I'm doing a stacked cake like this, how the collage papers line up with each other so that it really feels like it's going to be a unified cake in the end, even though I know I'm going to be adding some dripped frosting going down the sides. Because this one is a Halloween themed cake, I was really kind of leaning into more stylization. So that's why I did the torn paper for my frosting. This is a great way to use up your smaller scraps and kind of think about, you know, where are you going to have some longer areas and shorter areas for your frosting and then letting the white of the tear show through because it goes with the color scheme, and it just kind of adds a fun touch to it. So we're not trying to mimic a realistic cake. We're just kind of leaning into the shapes of a cake to build up a really fun mixed media collage. The frosting layer is also a great opportunity to elevate the cake form. So we've built up the three cake layers, and now by adding the frosting coming down the side, but not all the way down the side, we're further defining. This is a cake. It has tops to these shapes that we can't see. We're definitely not trying to do anything as far as realistic perspective. Like, I really wanted this to be illustrative and kind of lean into the simplicity of the shapes so that I could really let the paper shine and then all of the other embellishments that I add to it. There is a lot of back and forth in mixed media collage trying to decide what types of papers do we need to put together and what colors do we want to put together to make it work. So here I'm trying to play with, how can I jazz up that bottom layer so that it makes more sense and also just so that I don't know, sometimes you can just tell in a mixed media collage, especially that you're at an unfinished state. So a lot of it is just continuing to play, put pieces on, take pieces off, decide and do some editing and composing as you go. For this piece, I really felt like I needed something. I needed another layer, and it's fun because it mimics the layering of the black and white cake layers with the purple frosting. But it is still, it's a different purple paper. It's treated a different way. It's brighter, so it still establishes itself as something separate and not just, like, another giant layer of cake on the bottom of the page. For the candles, I love to do them oversized. It's just really fun. Here I'm kind of playing with the idea because this project came out of a birthday cake mixed media collage, I created for myself in a large scale that I then created a secondary smaller one just because they were so fun to create. I'm leaning into traditional candles at this point, but this is that editing process, kind of deciding what do I want to keep from the original concept of the project that I created in more traditional non thematic birthday colors. And then which ones do I want to take out? Sometimes you glue pieces down and you still decide to edit them out later. So here I am gluing down the candles and trying to decide, you know, is this really what I want and kind of leaning into the artistic process that I had established in the earlier pieces. And then you'll kind of see as this goes along that I make some decisions to change that. Small little pieces of paper, if you're searching for different colors, this one, I was able to get some really lovely yellows for my flames out of a warm, you know, red, pinks, oranges, yellows makes you know watercolor paper that I created. So I'm just kind of cutting out those small flame shapes to really bring the candles to life in a way. With these smaller pieces, it can be a little hard to manage them. So I know one thing you could do is have some tweezers that are just dedicated to your art practice that you could use. You can also see here that I have decided to scrap the candles. Sometimes you get into it, and as you're working through a process, even one that is tried and true in a different scenario like the other birthday cakes I've created, you just kind of find out that it's not quite what you want it to be. I really wanted to lean more into the Halloween side of it, too. And the candles are a very small detail, but I felt like there was a better way to do it for this type of holiday themed cake. So here I've decided to cut out a small skeleton. A small skull. So with my very minimally treated paper to get a little bit of that gray in there, I've cut out I've drawn and cut out a skull shape, and now I'm using my pencil to kind of add in the lines and the mouth detail. I'm not going like, super realistic. I'm still leaning into the illustrative quality of this and the play and the simplicity, but I really wanted to, you know, start to map that in with pencil before I go back in with my pen and ink detail. So it's very small, but again, I'm kind of trying to do it in scale to my cake, and I'm kind of envisioning that this cake, if it were existing in real life, was a big cake, a relatively significant cake. So in that scale reference is a very large skull, almost life size, and then I'm going to turn that into a candle. So I'm still going to use the candle flames that I was working on before, and I'm just going to use one and having it come out at the top. So the skull becomes the candle, which then leans into the Halloween fun of this project. Then I go in with some colored pencil to kind of help define the skull shape even more. I'm just trying to bring that to life and make it very clear this isn't a white blob. This is an illustrative skull on top of the cake. And then I'm going in with some fine liner so that I can really, really pop the details of the skull that I've created. So bringing those eyes out, bringing out the mouth a little bit, going into the candle with colored pencil to lighten it and darken it and warm it up and really kind of give it a little bit more nuance. 5. Adding Details 1: I love going back into my mixed media collages with colored pencil because you can just add so many you can add rich values. You can add texture. You can really make some different things pop and create some emphasis in some areas and just push that collage paper even further so it really gets some lovely dimension. Because even though I'm going for a flat collage here, I still wanted some play of dimension in different areas to lean into the fact that this is an illustration of a cake, and the cake is three dimensional. I decided I really did want to lean more into the shading aspect of it. I did not do that with the other cakes that I created. But this one just felt like it needed it. Plus, I just love shading on these textured papers. So I'm going in with my colored pencil to add the illusion of roundness just by having that darkness that fades out on all the sides. So they become a round three tiered cake. You can do this by adding in the darks, but also adding in the lights. If you add some darkness on the edges, and then you add some pops of light toward the middle that fade out the other way, then you get some really lovely nuances to your collage without having to be really refined about it. You could really lean into the color pencil texture. Oftentimes when I'm just doing a strictly colored pencil piece, I'll go for a more burnished look because that's what I love. But here, because I want to preserve the texture of the paper, I just want to add the texture and the value. I'm going to lean into letting the roughness of the color pencil application become part of the texture. I love this. I love how it starts to get moodier and just a little bit richer in its application. Then for all the cakes that I've done so far in this series, I really leaned into going heavy into the frosting to add some pops of lightness and pops of darkness. I lose a little bit of the watercolor texture that I had to begin with, but it just makes it a little bit more like frosting by adding this creamy smoothness on top and not being afraid to let the colored pencil layer up nice and thick. You wouldn't have to do this, but because I added the shading to the cake layers and the black and white sections, it kind of needed it. The more you add, sometimes the more you have to keep adding to kind of keep the piece moving toward a more resolved state. And sometimes your texture boto papers, although they're beautiful in and of themselves, they just need a little bit more. And color pencil is a great way to add that a little bit more without having to do a lot of extra work to a piece. So this part is a great example of how you can start with different textured papers and then really add a lot of nuance and character to them by working back into them with other art supplies. So like I mentioned in the earlier video, this little gray part on the bottom is part of a print that I made in college. So I've had this for decades. And it's really fun to see this get used in another piece. And because I cut it up, I've kind of taken away some of the nostalgia of it, and then that opens it up to be able to go back in with colored pencil now that it's in its new home as a base for this artwork and really start to lean into some really easy, basic, but intentionally placed and really important values. So it's kind of adding in some little gradients, playing into the texture there. Then I love to do the same thing when I go back up to my cake. I've added on the sides and really gotten it to wrap around and add a little bit of roundness. But it's always nice to add that little bit of drop shadow underneath the frosting just to help create a little bit more definition between the body of the cake and the frosting that's coming down the side. You can decide how intense you want to make this. Because we're going for a spooky Halloween cake in this class, I really wanted to play and have some fun going a little bit more intense with the shading than I did in some previous cakes that I created and some ideas I have for some other cakes that I want to create. Future. Then after I do the colored pencil section, here's where this project is really fun to embellish. What else can you add to your cake collage to really elevate it and take it into the spooky Halloween aesthetic? I love little tiny spiders. They're so incredibly fun to draw. So I have my fine liner out. I've added some spiders on my cake. I'm putting in some cobwebs coming down and really playing off of the structure that I've created with the collage. And how can I then add some ink details to really kind of start to bring the Halloween out even more? It is possible to do this step too far and add too much. So I like to do add a little bit, you know, kind of step back a little bit and kind of evaluate it. Where else do I need it? I also love to work back into my watercolor texture papers. So I love adding in fun little linework and different fun pen and ink techniques. And that's something that I explore in one of my other classes that I have shared with you as far as another resource of ways that you can push these techniques even further, whether that be in this project or in another artwork that you create in a similar style. And then also kind of what compositionally can we add? How can we balance this out? So I'm adding in different elements of the spider webs, but I'm really being very mindful of where I place them. And then because I had this great big background, I really did kind of want to play into adding a really, really big one, but I'm very intentionally going light with my marker. Like, I just kind of want to ghost it in and kind of map it out, and then I'm going to play with how can I make that pop a little more? I don't want it to distract. I want it to just be another element that is just further enhancing the Halloween vibe. So that's why I really didn't go in heavy. I could have gotten it with a sharpie and that would have taken it to a whole other place. But using a fine liner was a very intentional choice for my marker for this step of the project. And then I really wanted it to pop a little bit. So just adding some just dusting of white colored pencil in there just helps take some aspects of the cobweb and the spider web and just kind of helps make them pop up a little more. I didn't go over everything, but I went over quite a bit to really add the lights and the darks to help define it off of my texture background. And then, of course, the cobweb in the corner absolutely needed a spider friend also. Now the last one part of this project is adding the confetti in the background. I've done this with collage when I've had larger cakes that I've been creating and it's easier to cut the paper small and work with them. For this one, I just went in with paint pen. The orange doesn't show up a lot in the video, but when you look at the piece in real life, it adds just kind of a nice extra pop of orange value throughout the background. And then you're going to see, I'm going to play up with layering some other colors in there and also doing dashes and dots just to kind of really change it up. So right now I've got my purple paint pen. So I did dashes with the orange. I'm doing dots with the purple and just kind of playing around with different shapes that we kind of think of when we think of confetti. And it just adds kind of a fun final touch to your piece. It also helps you pull some of the other colors in. So my background is orange and black and gray. But by doing the paint pen with the purple, I'm adding in the purple from other parts and creating a more unified artwork. So if you have color in one section, a good rule of thumb is to then put that color somewhere else in the piece to kind of help move the eye and kind of so it's not just standing out on its own. So this one, you can do as much or as little as you want to. But then I really wanted the value contrast, so that's why I chose to do the white dots. Because having the three different colors of confetti creates a really fun, interesting look to it. And then if you play into different values within those confetti colors, it's just going to take it to another place. I may have gone a little overboard with the white confetti, but I really love how this looks. And I had so much fun creating it. I can't wait to see yours. So let's head it over to the last lesson to wrap up the class. See you there. 6. Final Thoughts: Thank you so much for joining me in our mixed media collage Halloween cake class. I had so much fun taking my birthday cake and putting a Halloween spin on it, and I cannot wait to see what you created. So I really hope you'll hop on over to the Projects and Resources section of class and upload some photos of what you've created to the student gallery, and don't forget to stick around and check out what other spooky delicious creations your classmates have created. This is going to be such a fun project, and the techniques that we're using to make our Halloween cakes are ones that you could absolutely apply in a variety of different ways. You could stick with the Halloween one and do some fun stuff with pumpkins or kind of, like, some fun scenes. Some cute little collage trick or treaters would be amazing using these techniques. Maybe that's one I'm going to have to try to crank out before the season is over. But either way, I can't wait to see what you create. So I will see you in the student gallery. If you want to take some time to share some feedback about the class, I am interested in doing more seasonal art classes here on Skillshare. So let me know if that's something that you would love to see more of by sharing that in the discussions and share in a review how you think the class turned out. Did you enjoy the process? What sort of different things did you like about it? What things could be improved as I work at kind of expanding the seasonal varieties of classes that I teach here. And I would love to stay connected if we aren't already. So don't forget to give me a follow on Skillshare to get notified about future classes. Follow me over on YouTube, if you want some little bonus stuff and check out things on Instagram. I share all things over there, whether it's classes I'm teaching here on Skillshare, classes I'm teaching in person, art adventures I go on and art projects that I'm creating in my studio. Thank you so much for being in class, and I hope to see you next time. Take care.