Introduction to Abstract Collage

1. Introductionto Abstract Collage: Hi, I'm Amy Wynn and I'm really happy to have you here in my Historic Mill studio in Rhode Island. Today we're going to explore collage, collage as a catalyst for abstraction. I love making collages. I feel like working with collage is a way to experiment things side by side that you might not normally play side by side and really work with color variations, work with your imagination. Artists have done this for quite a long time. Modern artists, contemporary artists, artists like Hannah Hook, an early Surrealist artist like Kurt Schwitters, who worked a little bit after her in the timeline of art history. But these artists used photographs. In this case, the Surrealist used photographs and bits of paper and drawing and painting combined to create images that were more dreamlike. Kurt Schwitters used remnants of everyday life ticket stubs. We're going to be actually exploring what you might just be able to use in terms of what you find around your household. For collage, we'll be talking about materials. This is actually one of my collages. And we'll talk about hard edge versus soft edge, torn paper versus cut paper, Working with simplification, which is a huge, huge benefit of working with collage. We'll also be looking at the beautiful possibilities of using the remnants of process inherent to cutting paper. You cut out a shape and they'll be leftover shapes. And I save everything. I save all the leftover shapes because I feel like those leftover shapes are opportunities for abstraction. We'll talk about arranging and rearranging leftover shapes and play with that in terms of color schemes, amping color, working with monochrome flipping value. It's all super playful and I think that you'll find as we go through the different activities and exercises that it will really spark new possibilities in image making. In addition, we'll talk a little bit about your aesthetic. You know, like what inspires you. Some collages are done with more biomorphic or organic shapes. We'll be working with a really fun exercise with this rhododendron here. And other collages have harder edges, they might have more of an industrial kind of feel. And we'll be working with a fun game called Cubo Mania where we're going to be cutting up an image and regrouping it and reorienting it with itself. So collage gives the opportunity to orient and reorient to layer to flip, to play with color schemes. It's a really fabulous way to edge into abstraction. And it's also, if you remember when you were a kid and maybe you made collages when you were in kindergarten or second grade or whatever it was, and you tore paper and you cut paper and you glued it down. This tactile experience is a really connective process. I'm excited to show you the sorts of things that I work with in the studio, around collage, using remnants of papers, working with different color schemes and really experimenting. I hope that what I show you will spark your inspiration to try it for yourself. 2. Collage Materialsand Techniques: I find collage materials to be so exciting because quite honestly, you can use pretty much anything to make a collage. So I want to show you some of the things that I really enjoy working with. And then I invite you to start collecting things like magazines. You know, you might be leaving through a magazine and see this incredible green color and you could just tear it out and put it in your collage pile to use at a later date. I like to use U. Sometimes I like to use envelopes. You know, I collect envelopes, especially if they have beautiful colors inside. You never really know what's going to be inside when you open it up, and they often have a lot of really beautiful patterns on them. I also sometimes use like stickers that come off of a package. Some of these other papers, here are things I'm about to show you, ways that you can maybe prepare handmade, hand colored papers for collage. But also some other store bought options for collage. Once you start collecting things to make collages with, you'll just start to amass a collage palette where you'll have multiple colors and you'll be able to pull things really quickly and have a lot to work with. All right, so I want to talk about papers first because often collage is done with paper. Collage can also be done with fabric, with wood, cardboard, all sorts of things. But basically, paper is a very common collage material. So typically you'll have a substrate which would be just a backing to glue things onto. This just happens to be a basic piece of paper. And then in terms of different types of papers, you know there's your basic construction paper, which there are many colors you can buy and you can even just use like kids construction paper. And construction paper can obviously be cut. You can make some beautiful shapes by cutting. And this is true of all these papers I'm going to show you. Scissors are just one way to work with creating shapes. Another way, especially if you have maybe more precise shapes or small shapes that you need, is to use some kind of blade. And obviously you want to be careful doing that. Often I'll put some kind of backing behind it, whether it's a piece of heavy cardboard or a cutting mat like this. Let's say you want to create a shape through cutting and you want to be really careful to keep your hand out of the way, right? So using a blade to cut, using scissors to cut. And then the possibility also, which I often do, of tearing the paper. Tearing the paper without any sort of cutting tool at all, creates a very different sort of edge. And you can see that here in some of these softer edged papers. These were all torn, but this edge was cut. So there are many possibilities. And you might think, well, that's a subtle thing. You know how you're actually going to cut your paper, but it actually creates a real variety in terms of just the look and the feel of the collage. I want to show you also just hard edge soft edge store bought paper. Handmade paper. The paper was actually handmade, not by me, but it was hand colored. It was hand painted. I'm going to show you that in a minute. I love the organic possibilities of painting your own paper. I also love the possibilities of the saturated flat quality of papers like this paper like this, you could buy in the art store, but you could also go to like a home improvement store or a paint store and take a look at the swatches they have on display and collect from there. A little bit here and there. And what's interesting as opposed to when you tear construction paper and get the soft edge, if you tear a paper like this, what happens is, and you can see it against the pink, is that because it's painted on one side, when you tear it in a certain way, it'll give you a white edge. And it will give you a colored edge. That also creates some beautiful variety in terms of collage, tearing, cutting. Store bought pigmented papers. And then the possibility of hand painted paper, I think I really build my collage palette around these ideas, around these effects. I'd like to show you how I hand paint paper. And this is a piece of sort of porous paper. It's like a rice paper or a mulberry paper. Any kind of paper that's sort of fibrous and absorbent I feel is a great one for this sort of possibility. So I'm going to tear it and sometimes I'll just tear some random shapes, not really knowing in terms of just preparing papers for collage. I'll tear some random shapes, I'll put it down on some kind of backing, you know, just for the paint purpose of painting. Sometimes I'll use diluted water color. But oftentimes just because I love the intensity of the pigment, I'll use an in a colored ink. So I'm going to try that now. And you'll see, I think that this was painted in this way, right, like torn and painted. And you'll see how that the ink kind comes out to the edges. So I'm just going to take a brush, I'm going to dip it in to this really beautiful blue. I'm going to go ahead and just paint the sin, and you can see how it absorbs out to the edge. If you use enough ink, it's really beautiful. You can see as the dark ink starts to absorb into the paper. You could see that like deckled edge. I just think it's so beautiful. And then I would let it dry like I did to this one and it would take a bit and then just pull it off. And there you have your piece to work with. Sometimes if I'm really going to get into a collage jag in the studio and I have some ideas in mind in terms of color. I'll tear a whole bunch of this rice paper and just do a whole range of colors. Let them dry, and then I'm set up to work. So that's a possibility you'll find your own way. Hand painted, store bought. And then ultimately the thing that's very important is, you know, yeah, I have all these beautiful papers, but how do I attach them to the substrate? How do I attach them to the collage surface? And there are many glues out there. There are many things you could possibly use. So one thing would be a glue stick, and I would recommend getting a glustic that advertises itself as a pretty powerful one, as opposed to the restickable kind where you can take things off and put things down. I'm going, I'm sure that many of you have used gluestics, but I'm going to show you how I would do it. I'm going to take the glutic, just put it onto the back of this piece of paper and then just flip the paper over. Decide where I want it to be and then just glue it down. And hold it for a second so it adheres in the end. Once you glue a lot of papers down, let's say you've completed your collage. Sometimes I'll take a piece of wax paper and put it over the collage. And then put a heavy book on top for a little while just so it really sticks down, but that's not going anywhere that's nice and secure. Then you always want to remember to put the cap back on the glue stick again. I know that sounds really basic, but I can't. You get into the heat of the making and then you come back later and you say, oh shoot my glues all dried up glue stick is one way to go. Another way to go is liquid glue. And liquid glue, again is totally a possibility. A lot of you have probably this lying around the house. You can put the liquid glue on your piece, and sometimes also you could put it in a jar. You might want to use a brush to spread it out, especially if it's in a jar. Then you can flip it and maybe ask yourself, oh, that looks nice on top of this other one. Give it a little bit of a rub on the back and work in that way. Those are two possibilities. Another possibility, which I'm going to show you later, is the hot glue gun. This really works well. We're going to do one collage that uses a lot of heavier cardboard. Hot glue gun is a really great way to really get those pieces to stick down. I'm going to show you that in a later lesson. So all of these materials, some of them might just be household items that you have lying around. A good glue is really important. If you like the look of these hand painted papers, I invite you to try that out. It's very satisfying. And then you can really dictate the colors that you're working with. But again, a basic construction paper, something like this, in various colors is a great starting point, cutting, ripping. And there's nothing like the feeling of like pressing down a piece of beautifully colored paper and really feeling it attached to the surface and start building these beautiful images out of collage. 3. Collagefor Simplification: So simplification is not simple. Simplification is sometimes, I think, one of the hardest things to do when we're working with an image that has a fair amount of detail. And we ask ourselves, what can we let go? How can we let it go? What we're going to work with in this lesson is using collage as a way to simplify an image. In the simplification of the image will actually create something much more abstract. They'll be an essence of the original image there, but it's really a way to let go of the things that we might think are important. It's very hard for a lot of people to do that, including myself. So collage is an incredible teacher for simplification. If you give yourself some rules, I have this image here. I took this photograph on the beach out in Provincetown on Cape Cod. And I love the way the boats are situated on the beach. And I thought, you know, that might make a pretty interesting collage. So I took the image and I made a drawing from it, like a simplified drawing already. In the process of working from a photo to a drawing, I've started to simplify, but I knew this was going towards the collage. I knew that I wasn't so interested in cutting out every blade of grass. I wanted it to be a little more simple and graphic. So what I did is I took a piece of tracing vellum, which is a transparent or translucent paper, and I laid it over the image. And I actually said, Amy, you just get five shapes. That's it. And it's a challenge, right, Because there's so many shapes actually going on here. So I took a pen and I just said, all right, I just get five shapes. So I made one shape, the boats, I made the other shape, the beach. Another shape is the grass, another shape is the sky, and the fifth shape is the buildings in the distance. So I did that. And this in and of itself is quite an abstraction if you're knowing that it started here, right? So I don't really need the photograph anymore and I don't really need the drawing anymore. And what I ultimately made from this is this collage. The colors aren't exactly what the colors were in the original image. I just chose colors that I felt were sort of suitable or look good together. And I want to take you through the steps of how I got from here to here, just so that you can potentially try this for yourself. Now I know I mentioned that you could cut paper or tear paper. This is a hard edged collage. This is a collage, as you'll see, that I cut with an exacto blade and I glued it down and it's quite hard edged. You could take this idea and take paper, and you could rip shapes like if I was working with ripping this central shape here, as opposed to the precision of scissors. I could take this feeling of the central shape and just start to tear the paper, keeping the remnant shapes, because those are often so beautiful. I love just the feeling of the paper as I tear it. Actually, I love, yeah, You know, a shape like this versus a shape like that. A different feeling. It's got the gesture of that shape. But if you like this kind of chunky, organic kind of quality, you could certainly try this with tearing. That's a possibility. But I'm going to take you through the cut paper version because there's some things that I think will be helpful for you to know about. All right. What I also have here is a piece of what they call transfer paper. Transfer paper is pigmented on one side and the other side is not pigmented. I use this, it's a short cut. It's basically a short cut. What I can do with it because I have I consider this a map, because I have my map. I can the transfer paper I'm naming this fifth shape. I'm going to do this very light color for it. I can take this paper, I can lay it with the pigment side down on top of the light paper that I've chosen. Then I can take a very hard edged pen, like a ballpoint pen, pen that has like a metal tip. Often I'll tape down the edges. If I'm doing something a little bit more involved, double check that the pigment side is down, then I can go in and just. Trace around the shape. You've already done the work to create these shapes, right? You've already done the work through the tracing process and through the difficult process of simplifying to actually create these shapes. The effort to try to redraw them all over again just seems like for me like a waste of time. I did that and it transferred down onto my page, just like that, because this shape is little. I'm going to use my blade. I'm going to come in and I've got a cutting surface down beneath it. I'm going to do one thing with these is you want to make sure that they're this is a little bar that you can turn to make sure the blade is tight in there. And I'm going to come down one side here. Sometimes I'll turn the paper to make it easier to cut in a different direction. You want to just be steady and slow. There's no rush here. It's actually, I really enjoy cutting shapes out. It's a very meditative process. Again, I find cutting towards myself a little easier than cutting sideways or cutting away. You'll find what's easiest for you, but I definitely recommend making it as safe as possible. You never want to have your hand behind the blade. You always want to have your hand in a safe place. All right, let's see how this goes. I think, yeah, I can pop this out. There's my shape, right? And now let's talk a little bit about assembling the collage. So this shape is this shape here. Just sort of redoing it for you. And you know what, Also, I really love, I love this remnant. We'll talk more about this, but you know, don't say, oh, well this paper is ruined now because, you know, it's left over from this. This is the stuff that later on in this course, we'll be using these remnants of process to make even more abstract things. So keep that. So I have to put down for this version, you know, a surface that I'm going to glue things on. Then I'm going to start to place my pieces. I did a little pre cutting of these pieces, but you can see as I'm laying them on each other, they are looking interesting. Even over here. I transferred these and I cut them in just the same way. It's like a puzzle and a beautiful puzzle. A puzzle that you've pretty much planned and figured out, but you never really know until the end what, what it's really going to look like. I've got this piece here, I'm going to flip it this way. There we go. So I've got these pieces now, and you know, I have to make a choice about how I want to put them together. So one thing that a lot of people do with collage is, you know, these aren't perfectly cut. You know, they're going to fit the best they can. So some people really snug them in and put them right up to the edge. It almost doesn't matter like what color the paper is beneath it. That's definitely one option. Put this guy in here, you know? That's one option. But another option, which I also think is kind of interesting, and again, we'll talk a little bit more about this when we talk about color variation. But another option is to actually give them like a little wiggle room, like a little breathing room that can also be sort of beautiful depending on what's underneath. Just giving them a little space in between creating a little bit of a gap can also be quite wonderful. Then it would be the process again, of gluing things down, which we saw. But I'll just do it with this piece to remind you, sometimes I don't like putting the glue on top of the piece. I'm about to glue down with the collage directly underneath it. Because then if you get glue off the side, it's going to get on the collage. So you can do a number of things. One thing you could do is just take a piece of scrap paper, it's kind of your glue surface. And you can then have that beneath it. Put your glue down and I'm going to try to get it out, especially to these pointy bits. I'm going to try to get it out as far as I can to the edge, so that when I glue it down, those don't curl up on me. Then you can move your glue paper aside, Then just lay in your first piece. These other ones are movable because they're not glued yet. But I like to start in the middle and spread out to the edge. Start in the middle, spread out to the edge all the way around. Yeah, that's pretty nice, very satisfying. Just even feeling the paper is very satisfying. That's my first piece glued down, and then the other pieces would follow suit in just exactly the same way. Ultimately, you end up with this. It is very simplified version of the mother image here. And I think that this possibility of simplification, the possibility of using a map, and again, this mapping process, is incredibly helpful in terms of even the fact that you can't see completely through the tracing paper. You know, you don't have to make a drawing if drawings, not your jam. You don't really have to even make the transitional drawing. You could just lay some trace paper on top of a photograph, right? And trace it. The trace paper obscures a lot of the detail. I can't really see all of the blades of grass and just choose five shapes they might be, that means you're going to have to let go of some of the in betweens, right? But those five shapes can lead you to what I consider a beautiful simplified version of the subject, which is in itself abstract. I suggest looking through your photographs or maybe going out and photographing things with collage in mind. Over time, you'll start to see things in a new way. You'll see the potential of your world in a new way. Bring it back, get some paper, maybe try to find some transfer paper. You can even get carbon paper at a copy store and play a little bit with transfer varying maybe the color schemes and backgrounds. But try working with this discipline of simplification, because simplification can be very beautiful and it's one of the gifts of collage. 4. New Color Horizonswith Collage: Collage is a great way to explore new color horizons. So I think many of us, including myself, we get sort of in a loop with the colors we like. And we start to maybe lean on habit a little bit. I'm just speaking for myself and I think that collage because there's this opportunity to constantly change it up. There's an opportunity to constantly try new things side by side without making a big commitment to it. I think collage is like an incredible way to expand the colors that you might choose to use. So I use it a lot for that. I do a lot of different color schemes based on one image, actually in an effort to create variety. But also in an effort to ask myself what's the strongest way that this image, this abstract image, might manifest based on the shapes and the colors and the dance that they do. This is the collage that we made in the previous lesson. It has rather subdued colors. These were colors that I chose because I like them. We put it together. It's not really hooked to the reality of the scene, but it has naturalism to it. What might be interesting is what if I tried to investigate flipping the value of the colors? The value of a color is its darkness or its lightness. A color that has a very light value. And here's just a filtered version of this collage. A color that might have a very light value would be something like that. A color that would have a very dark value would be something like that. What I did is actually made a new, I'm into mapping, I made a new, actually made two maps of the image. One map of the image really based on what was happening in the true value range for this. Took the black and white, dark shape, dark shape, light shape, light shape, definitely a little more extreme, right? I made a map using the shapes and I named them a color. I named them. I'm right here. This is the color range. We did use the pink, the green, the dark brown, the beige, and the light brown. Now I'm using a range of still just five colors, white to black with three midtones. What I did was I used the same map. These little color swatches here are an effort to show that number five is my darkest dark, Number one is my lightest light, three is my midtone, four is my mid dark, and two is my mid light. Again, simplification, like really dialing it down. If I was looking at the photograph of this, there'd be a lot more variables, right? But I'm working from the collage. I made this black and white version. I really like it. I think it's you might not enjoy maybe black and white images, but there's a possibility to it. There's a lot of artists who use shades of gray and black and white. So then I thought like, what if I flipped it? Like what if I took this idea and I flipped the values? So I made another map. And in this map you'll see the difference. Look at that. So in this case, my one is lightest light five is darkest dark. I basically flipped it darkest dark as lightest light, lightest lights, darkest dark. The midtone stays the same. These flip and these flip. And it's just in an effort to show you that in just working with five colors, you can do things like this. You can do things like flipping values. This is a very different image, right? It's a very different image because it's the inverse, working with things like inverses, working with things that show different kinds of gradations. And again, I really do feel like having a map to go by is a very useful thing because when you start with the map, you can do your planning. And then once you have the plan down, then you can play. So this is just one way to play, one way to play with collage in a very subdued color range, right? In a monochrome that might be appealing to you. So the monochrome might be appealing to you. This sort of color range of these subtle colors might be appealing to you, but you might be somebody who loves like fluorescence. Or you might be somebody who really has like a high key color scheme that those are the things that you like or things that maybe you don't like sometimes. Actually trying color schemes that are not familiar to you, that you've never used before that make you maybe feel a little uncomfortable can be really fun. So we've done the monochrome, we've done the neutrals. And I pulled some colors that I consider quite bright. And these colors actually are ultimately going to be creating the same collage. The same collage of the boat that we have been working with. But it's going to have a very different feeling, right? This versus that very different feeling. So I pulled colors that are very, I mean, I wouldn't say they're garish, but they're like really zingy. And I'm curious to see the effect of this as these colors come together. So this is my muse, this is my model over here. Let's just see what these color shapes do in reference to that. We've got the black, we've got these colors, we're going to transition here. I've arranged them here. I've pre cut them because it takes a little while to cut them, and we've gone through how to cut shapes and all of that. So let's start to play a little bit with these colors, these color arrangements. So this is that, ooh, that's actually kind of interesting too, if we just substitute, right, like just substituting a color. Look at how much that changes the feeling of that collage. But I'm actually interested in making something totally brand new. So I've chosen this very bright orange for the beach. I've chosen this yellow for the middle section here. I've chosen this hot red for the grass. I've chosen this very extreme blue for the sky and this purple for the distant buildings already. It's like a very different image, right? I'm actually really, in this case, really enjoying having these fissures, having these gaps between the shapes, because in choosing a much darker background, in choosing black, it amplifies the color. It makes the color more dramatic. And I think that that's something to consider as you're working. Like it doesn't always have to be a white ground or it doesn't always have to be a realistic ground. It doesn't have to be a neutral ground. I highly recommend that you play with different backgrounds and also that you play with different distances. Like maybe you want just a tiny little fissure. Maybe you want something broader. What really enhances the image? What makes it most interesting, depending on what you're trying to say. So this says something very different, right, than this. These both say something very different than this one right here. All of these images born of the same muse, born of the same picture of boats. Depending on the color scheme and depending on how you nuance the relationship between the shapes and the background can give you a totally different image. So this is sort of a testament to how collage and just the piecing of shapes can create an incredible amount of variety. And also like a gateway to experimentation. And giving you the opportunity to maybe push through some hesitation around trying something new. Because guess what? If you decide, you know what, I don't really like that base shape, Well, this isn't glued down yet. I can replace. I can change, I can put, ultimately I can sub things out and move them around in any way that I want, based on just what I'm inspired to do. So it's very, very playful, it's very, very fun. And I highly recommend that you get a range of colors, even colors that maybe really aren't your preference, and play with how they work together. It's all relative, and it's really like this beautiful puzzle to work through. 5. Collageas Catalyst: So this pile of scraps right here, I think this is absolutely gorgeous. And this is what you might over time start to accumulate when you start really getting into making collage, You know in this pile there's like rounded cut shapes, there's torn shapes, there's little echoes of organic shapes. There's all these different shapes. I've got actually piles like this. I have a yellow pile, I have a red pile, I have a blue pile of green pile of brown pile. I've actually organized all my scraps into piles. Kind of consider it my collage palette. And I keep these in this way so I can easily access pieces that I might be able to use. And it's just an incredible Mm. Testament to the beautiful evidence. Like this is evidence of my practice, this is the evidence what's left over. More and more, I've become interested in like what's left over in terms of collage and how we can use those leftovers, those remnants to further improvise and further create variations and be even a stronger catalyst for abstraction. So I highly recommend that you keep things, even if it's like the tiniest little snippet of red paper, you never know where. You might just be able to glue that down and make a collage go from good to great. So I want to show you an example of just my process on one thing that I worked on. I had a model in the studio and I made some drawings. And I ended up actually, you know, actually collaging the drawings together based on a series of xeroxes I made. First thing I did was you had the model in the studio. And then I made a collage of the drawings where I moved the birds up, I moved the skull to the other side, made a fractured version of the model. And then I took those shapes and I started to transfer them onto a series of colors. As I did that, I actually took photographs. I found that document even though this wasn't the end game. Documenting the process like oh, I really like how these basic blue shapes look against that sort of light yellow or oh, what happens when I take the silhouette that I removed of the figure and add it in again on a stagger, right? So if I just tossed that in the trash because it wasn't like part of what I wanted to use, I wouldn't have had the opportunity to play in this way. So I played around a bit with shapes. I played around a little bit with working with assembling. This is a collage, just an image of the collage I made, assembling them and sort of staggering the chair, staggering the shadow. And I found this very appealing. And ultimately in and of itself, collage in and of itself is absolutely, you know, this could be my finished product, but it actually inspired me to create an oil painting based on that collage. I had this collage in mind when I ultimately created this image. So collage can be a catalyst for variation, but it also can be a catalyst for other media, right? Other materials. So paper to oil paint. So that might be something where collage could inspire you. The variations of collage could inspire you in other media, and I totally invite you to experiment with that. If you aren't typically a collage artist, maybe you're an oil painter, how could collage influence other things that you do? All right, so let's dial it back a little bit. I want to talk about possibilities of these variations. We just made a bunch of collages. We made collages that were monochrome, right? We made collages that were rather subtle color. And we also made collages that were very brightly colored. I put out here, not the pieces that we used to make the actual collage, but actually the leftovers, The leftover pieces that we. The remnants of our process. I want to show you how you might play with this a little bit. If you just said, I want to see how these monochromatic pieces dance together. You could start to lay them down in different ways already. You can see that this is really nothing like what we started with. You can lay them down in different ways, maybe play a little bit with things poking through little windows that you might have created. Or you can say, oh, you know, maybe I like it this way a little bit more. Or maybe I want to put this black piece behind the gray piece, and behind that piece. You can see that with the remnants, you can actually create very beautiful shapes. I keep the remnants. Let's take a look at what happens when we play with the very colorful remnants. Again, just a different feeling. Yeah, that's so you can play with like complimentary colors laying on top of each other or coming underneath. Right. So it's this dance and suddenly I pulled this, oh I, you know, like this little yellow bit, as I pulled this to the left, just sort of emerged. And I really love that, I really love that. And this blue on top of the red starts to vibrate because these colors have a simultaneous contrast to each other. When they're put up against each other, they create a vibration because they're complimentary. So this has a very different feeling than the black and white. And then ultimately, we can also play with our, you know, pieces. We come back to where we started and play with different variations of our original collage. Why not? The next step is, you know, maybe you hit something you like in terms of the arrangement of the remnants. You know, maybe you glue it down and you say that's it. But sometimes I don't glue them down. Sometimes I just keep making variations. And what I do in keeping on making the variations is I'll come to a certain point and I'll say, oh, you know, I really love this section. And I'll take photographs, cameo photographs of those sections. I'll take photographs, I'll zoom in, I'll take a shot of one orientation. I'll take a shot of another shot of another. I'll just keep the collage is like an image generator. Like an engine. Once you glue things down, of course that is what most collages end up as. But once you glue things down, then you no longer have the engine running, right, Like you no longer have the variations possible. So sometimes if I'm really enjoying a series of shapes, I'll just keep moving them around and take photographs. And then from those photographs I can make drawings, I can make paintings. I can use them for different things. And I can even start to mix in, you know, like other colors, like, you know, I have a lot of colors now. I actually have a ton of remnants from my process with you. Remember we started with one image, We just started with that innocent picture of the boats on the beach, and now we have an incredible number of things to play with based on what was left behind currently in the studio. I have one image that I've been working on, a larger, more complex collage I wanted to show you. I really love going to natural history museums and sketching. This is a photograph I took up in Montreal at the Natural History Museum up there. I'm really interested in this combination of um, organic, like animal shapes and architecture. So I just took this one image and I thought what would happen if I used these image shapes and transferred them and created a collage? So what I wanted to show you is where I'm at with it right now and it's not glued down, so I'm going to be careful here, but I just borne from this one image, I transferred the shape of the animal and the architecture to create this collage which has just 12, just about four or five colors to it. But what I've done is I've repeated images, I've used the positive and the negative. I've flipped things. And I haven't glued it down. Because one, I like the possibility of maybe taking photographs from it and working on a series based on different arrangements. But also, I'm just curious about, you know, what if I moved this down here and had these gray shapes overlap the white? Or what if I took this big shape and moved it a little bit lower, right? What if this shape came down and sort of overlapped or came underneath that shape? So you can also, and I'm not going to do this right now because I'm kind of enjoying where this is at, but you can also just take shapes and do a throw down, right? Like I could take these shapes or I could take some of these remnant shapes. And rather than arranging, just throw them down in a bunch of times and just see where they land. Because then actually it becomes a situation where it's not up to you and it's super playful and you just get what you get and you don't get upset and document it and keep moving. So this playful possibility for variations, variations on a theme, variations on color schemes, variations based on the beautiful evidence, the remnants of what was left behind, I think is a fascinating and really beautiful opportunity to create new images and explore collage as a catalyst for abstraction. 6. Collage Remnantsof Consumption: So I was teaching a collage class a couple of years ago. And I had this idea because we were, you know, working with regular papers, hand patent papers. I had this idea to diversify the papers that we were putting down. I gave the class the assignment and you might want to try this, that for an entire week. They didn't throw away any wrappers, any boxes or anything that their food came in that they might have normally recycled or thrown away. I said, I'd like you to keep it all in a bag. Keep it all in a bag, and then bring it to class. And they did it and kept their Jolly Rancher wrappers. And they kept their tea boxes. And they kept their, you know, the little containers for their tea bags. And they came to class the following week and I had them spread out on the floor. And each of them just like laid out all their trash on the floor. And I said, all right, this is what you're going to use for your next collage. All of these remnants of your consumption. And we all have remnants of consumption, right? I mean, it's actually kind of a problem in terms of just, you know, the amount, maybe perhaps that the Earth consumes. But I thought, why not twist that and make something beautiful out of it? So it got me thinking, actually, of my own practice, and I thought, well, that would be kind of neat to try. So I took a sketch book and I was actually in Italy and I took all of the packaging like stickers and packaging off of all the food that I was eating. And I didn't really think about making art. In fact, it's probably good not to even just think like I'm making art. I just really thought about collecting, towards making. And I took these stickers and I just stuck them in the book. I didn't do anything on top of them yet, I just stuck them in there every day I'd collect something and just stick it in the book. Then I came back home and the book sat around studio for a while. And then I said, you know what? What if I took these stickers that I stuck in the book, did a month long practice where I actually took a remnant of something I consumed here back in the states every day for a month, glued that on top of the Italian remnant, and then did a little drawing painting on top of it. For an entire month, I filled this sketchbook which was occupied with these Italian remnants, I put an American remnant on top, and then I drew and painted on top of that. And it really became such a fun playground using shapes and colors that I would never have thought to use before that was exciting. And I filled this whole book and I really love the fact that it's just like chunky and full of all of these wonderful collages. And then I started to think, you know what are some other things that just happened to arrive? I started to collect envelopes. We all get mail. You may have noticed, or maybe you didn't notice, that the inside of business envelopes are actually really cool. There are blue ones, there are gray ones. Look at this, it's almost like a snake skin pattern. There are ones that look like confetti. There are ones, let's check this one out, that are a little more geometric and have windows. I started to get like a little bit obsessed with just envelopes. And I have a huge collection of envelopes now, and they all have different interiors. So this was collecting the remnants of like things that we open that we normally would recycle or throw away. I thought, how could I use that as collage material? I started to take the envelopes apart, like peel them apart carefully. At first, I started to glue them together and play with the patterns, play with the stamps, play with the interaction of shapes. And then I started to run them through my sewing machine. I started to sew lines onto them and bring them together, which is a little more experimental. But sewing can actually be connected to drawing because you're making lines with string. I started to paint on top of these collages, I started to work with different colored threads. I actually also started to be quite interested in how the back looked as well. This possibility of working with, again, remnants, things you have around the house. Remnants of consumption is really an exciting possibility. Then I started to play with like a little scraps of cardboard and started to work with sewing them together as well. I liked that look, but I felt like I wanted something almost more sculptural, something a little bit heartier, My next little obsession. And I do think that creativity, an inspiration, can sometimes involve like needing to kind of latch onto an idea and play it out. So what I started to do is, you know, we flatten boxes for recycling. We flatten boxes all the time. And with so many boxes arriving in the mail, I thought, well, what is the shape of a flattened box? So I'm just going to flatten this out. This is, I started to get like, so curiosity is also for me, really important. I started to think like, wait a minute, like what is the shape of this box when it's flattened out? So I started to take like my tea boxes when they were empty and boxes that would have arrived from other shipments and start to flatten them because each one is a different shape. And each one I just I don't know, I just thought it was really interesting and beautiful, that it was like a surprise each time that the flattened box was a possible shape that I could work with. So you guessed it. I started collecting flattened boxes. I have a huge box of them, but I've chosen some recent shapes that I've collected that I've flattened out, that I thought might be fun to put together as a collage. Now notice I'm not really using the colored side. I'm actually, I'm going to make some space here. I'm actually quite interested in the variations of the colors of the cardboard. And I'm also interested in these circles, in this case, how these circles might interact together. I started to work in this way, but I realized that my regular glue stick and my regular elmers glue is just not going to cut it because these boxes are bendy and they're harder and they're a little tougher to glue down. So I got a hot glue gun and I'm going to show you how I start a collage based on remnants of consumption having to do with these flattened boxes that I've been working with. So again, it's just another possibility if you like this idea to collect things from home and use them everyday things as material. So this is a little mini hot glue gun. It has a little glue stick in it and I've plugged it in to warm it up. You want to be careful because it is hot. If you decide if you have a hot glue gun, great know how to use it. If you don't have a hot glue gun and you're curious about it, you want to avoid touching the tip of it because it's very hot and you'd get burned. But the beauty of it is that rather than gluing something down with like a liquid glue and you have to sit there and hold it and you know, these sorts of things would invariably curl up on you. The beauty of a hot glue gun is like it's one and done. You put it down, you lay it, and it just sticks. So I want to show you that. So one thing I think about is like, all right, I've got these two shapes. There's a, now there's a conversation between the shapes. All right, well, what do I want that conversation to be like? Do I want it to lay over a white section? Do I want it to lay over another circle? Do I want it to lay on the side? I like how this is lining up with that and that these edges are spilling off the edge here. I'm feeling that that might be the position. I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to just squeeze the glue gun. Lay some hot glue on the back of this piece. Hot glue can be a little stringy. Then I'm going to put the glue gun on the side. It takes a couple of minutes to set up, so you have a moment really to work with it. Then I'm going to go ahead and just press this down. You can feel the warmth coming through the cardboard. Just give it a moment to set, then you can see how quickly it attaches itself. That's one shape that I'm interested in. I also really love this. It looks like eyes, like glasses. Let's try to see where that might end up. I'm thinking got a lot of circles going on down here. Maybe if it comes up a little higher up into this area also. Do we let things overlap off to the side like where that's going? I'm once again going to just put a little glue on here. You don't need a ton. I love the hack lo gun. I'm just gonna let that just set right in there. Yeah. And then ultimately I want to do one more shape. I like this gray cardboard against the warmth of the brown cardboard. So let's just do, oh, I have a choice. White or gray. Gray would create a little more variety. White. We've already got a white shape. Again, you're asking yourself, you know, what might create variety? What might look good in conjunction? Because, you know, collage like a lot of visual making is all about relationships. It's all about what might look good in conjunction with something else. I'm thinking this one wants to go here. So it's a little bit of a felt sense of where things might go. Again, you can arrange things in advance. I'm doing it a little more free form right now, a little bit more playfully, but this possibility of working with remnants. I have a few more here, you could keep adding them. Sometimes I'll put something underneath to show through if there's circular shapes. But this possibility of working with remnants of consumption, things that you might not normally think to investigate. Open a box, flatten it out, what's the shape, what's the color, Maybe take a look inside your bills. Once you get over the shock of what's in there, like take a look at the envelope like, wow, that is a bonus. Maybe I could use that for something. If you are into sewing or into drawing, you can make collages that come together with glue, but you can also make collages that come together with sewing of things that you collect Over time, you might consider creating a book, creating a situation that has layers of remnants of things. Over time, it really almost becomes like a diary of your life. And when you're using things from your life, from everyday life, I actually think that it starts to bring a little bit more of a sense of human connection and meaning to the work. So you might just want to try it on a certain week, like just collect things and lay them out and play a little bit with how they might come together as a collage. I think you'll find it to be a very playful process and also you'll be able to tap into pretty much a never ending supply of materials for your collage work. So give it a try and explore how consumption can be an inspiration. 7. Biomorphic Collage Expansio: So there's a lot of different subject matter for collage. I mean, collage actually doesn't really even need a subject matter. You could just make collages as we've seen out of old boxes or rip paper. But sometimes you see collages that work with more organic shapes. I like to call them sort of biomorphic collages, where you might like for here. For instance, I actually very precisely cut out a photograph that I took in Mexico of a pomegranate tree. If I flip it here, I think it's really beautiful and ultimately could possibly be a collage element which is based on a biological or organic shape. Sometimes I also work with collages that are based on industrial shapes and we'll be working with that a little later in the course. This collage has buildings, it's a very different look than this one. This one here also has my daughter Celeste surrounded by flowers like this. Using photography is also a biomorphic collage possibility. What I want to work with in this course is the possibility of using an image that in this case actually a photograph of a rhododendron flower. And use that as a springboard for where collage might meet drawing, where one image born from collage could morph into something else. That's another possible, almost surrealistic or thing that you might want to try, where collage might meet drawing. That is also an incredible gateway for making images that aren't up to you, that push you beyond your habit. In order to do that, we'll need a few supplies. We are going to be, I actually think in this case just working with a glue stick is nice because we're just going to be gluing down some super simple shapes. You want to have a mother image, I call it a mother image. You want to have maybe a photograph, that botanical or that is something more natural versus something hard edged just for this particular activity. It can be a color. It could also be done in black and white. But I like color. I think color might be fun to try. Then you'll need some kind of glue. You'll need a backing. You'll need something to put the image on a little ruler perhaps, And then a Sharpie and a range of colored pencils that doesn't have to match perfectly, but it might parallel with the image. Really simple materials and really simple process actually. I'm going to put them aside and put them in a place where I can reach them. Then I'm going to take this image, I'm going to shop for areas of the image that I think are beautiful. Sometimes I call this window shopping. I'm going to see if I might actually be able to use this little view finder here to help me find some sweet spots. I'm going to put this down on a section that I find beautiful. Then I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to take a Sharpie and I'm just going to find five sections of this image that I think maybe I might want to work with. They don't have to be all rectangular. They don't have to be a square. But I'm going to encourage you to go ahead and shop for just five sections of whatever image you chose. They could even be long, skinny sections, if that's of inspiration to you. And then one more, kind of enjoying this very pale green down here. You can see that you can also choose with your camera zooming in. Zooming out. But you can see that by choosing sections like this with a view finder of some kind, it makes it a little easier to choose. Now I'm going to go ahead and cut these sections out. I'm going to save the remnants, not that we're necessarily going to use it for this project, but remember, I save everything, right? You know that about me by now. I'm going to put the remnants on the side maybe for future use. I'm just cutting out these five parts. I'm going to lay them wherever because we're liberating them from the image. We're saying, oh well these were little juicy bits, little sweet spots that I particularly enjoyed. But in the end where they end up for this practice, we'll see they might be upside down from the original orientation. I suppose that you could even cut shapes off of your mother image that aren't rectangular. You could use circles, you could use different things. All right. This is my remnant. I'm going to put it on the side. Here are my shapes. I'm going to take a moment. I don't want to think too much. The intellectual mind often gets in the way of creative flow. You might just throw them down, actually, I think that might be what I do. I might just throw them down any which way. You can see that I'm wanting to arrange. But randomness is actually can be a really good thing. Now that I have a general sense of where I want them, I'm going to take my glue stick and just go ahead and glue them rather quickly. I'm leaving a gap. I'm leaving a little space in between, and you'll see why in a minute. And then this last big square, why not? All right. It's a collage. It's a collage of remnants of shapes. Now we're going to take it and morph it, evolve it, use the collage as a catalyst for something even more abstract. The first thing I often like to do in this situation is to create some boundary container for the image because there's a lot of space around this. Sometimes when you create a little bit of a container for the image, you can, you know, in it in a little bit. So I'm just going to create a little container for the image by, you could use a ruler for this, but I'm just going to eyeball it here. I'm going to bring a boundary in. It might be like just off a square, Like a little bit rectangular. As soon as I do this, these shapes start talking to this line instead of that edge. So what I've done is I've sort of amped up the energy between the shapes and the edge of the composition, which to me, just makes it more exciting than having all this like, nebulous space around it. All right, so that's a first step. Now, what do I mean by evolving the image? You've got these rectangles down there. It used to be a flower, but now it doesn't really look like a flower anymore. What I'm talking about now is taking clues from these images. Clues may be leading off the shapes and extending them into the white space. I'll show you what I mean by that. One of the first things that hits me is the line of the flower here. I'm not really drawing on the photograph, but I'm coming off the photograph and following that curve to the edge. I can also come off the photograph here and follow that curve to the edge. I'm linking it up to the edge based on color and shape. This curve can also hook to the edge. This line, two can come even further down and hook to the edge. This here, there's the line coming off this one. And this seems to be curving in this direction. I'm making these shapes, these intersecting shapes coming off of. And based on some of the shapes that I have here in my remnants from my image, again, I'm not working super slowly. I am working quickly so that I can come in and, you know, just let it have a little bit more fluidity and flow. I don't know what it's going to end up looking like. And that is actually fine with me because for me that's really like the beauty of abstraction. And the beauty of collage is like making peace with not knowing, right? Like making peace with like not securing an outcome with just like letting it be what it needs to be. So I'm going to continue list running a few more lines off of here and then I want to kind of slip into doing some color. All right? Do I do like how that's starting to look? There's maybe just a little bit. It's super fun to make these extensions too. So you can see there starts to be a rhythm filling the space. This is where it's sort of fun to work in some color. So I chose some colors that more or less go with what's happening here. You could also do this with paint. You could do it with like an opaque paint. But I'm choosing colored pencils because that's a quick and easy way to start creating this morph in this extension, this pale yellow green. This color is not going to match perfectly, but it'll give you the idea, pale yellow green coming off of this region here. And I'm just going to go ahead and just color in this shape. And I'm going to look for a few more of these green shapes. The yellow green shapes, there's a petal coming off of here. What starts to happen as I start to fill these in a little bit is that these lines become shapes, right? What used to be a line is now a shape. And that shape is inspired by what's been going on in the collage. I'm ready for some pink. There's a lot of pink in this. So here's an area of pink, well that color match is pretty good. This sort of shapy work can be super inspiring and can really generate ideas, generate ideas for other projects. Like, you know, sometimes this in and of itself can be the piece you end up with. But sometimes what can happen is that you work on a collage like this, I call this like a biomorphic expansion, right? You work on a biomorphic expansion like this. And for me, as I'm working, I start to actually generate ideas. And it's almost subconscious, just by the almost relaxing act of coloring in shapes, I start to think, oh, you know, this would be a really interesting painting or, you know what, if I worked in this way with another subject matter, this is really very dimensional. Now that I'm putting in these dark greens, you could see how the pinks are really starting to pop. So I'll just do a few more little shapes here and then I think you get the idea. I really love working with organic shapes. I like working with shapes, shifting the green here to be a little bit brighter. I like working with shapes that have some flow and some pop. That's my wheel house. This biomorphic expansion project is really like, perfect for a lot of the things I like to work with. I recommend you the next step here would be to continue coloring out the shapes to continue working with these spaces. I think that you can subtle color variations, but I think that the clue from this photograph, and I encourage you to go and take photographs with this in mind. The color cues from this photograph and the shapes that come off of it. They're not something that I would have just thought to do. Like if I sat down without the photograph, I wouldn't have ever really come up with something like this. So the idea of having these little juicy bits of the photograph as a springboard, as an inspiration, as a spark, really allows you to then jump into something a little different. Jump into something that might not be your habit in terms of working. So I encourage you to try this biomorphic collage, expanding an image. You might even have a bunch of photographs that you might just want to print out and cut up and glue down and draw off of. But I think that over time, remembering to put a little container around it, really allowing these shapes to flow and then choosing some beautiful colors to fill it in, I think that you'll find that that'll be a really wonderful way to generate new work. 8. Deconstruct Reconstruct: I'd like to play a game with you. I'd like to play a game called Cubo Mania. And cubomania is something I like to play when I'm trying to generate new images. In particular, when I'm looking at images that have more of an industrial kind of quality to them. Even though I tend to have a preference for working with more organic shapes and organic images, which I can show you here in this drawing of a tree that I made. I took this drawing of a tree which is very fluid and very organic. I took it and I actually blew it up, and I made a tracing out of it. And I took that tracing and I'm going to show you how to do this. And I cut it up in multiple ways and placed it with itself. And when I placed it with itself, and we're going to go through this step by step, I was actually ultimately able to make an image like this, which is a real abstraction from the tree. It still has like the feeling of treeness to it a little bit, but I transferred that tracing, I painted it in. And it was just a really nice way to move from something slightly organic and realistic to something more abstract through this idea of using a grid or using cube shapes to assemble something new. So I want to show you that first. I want to show you sort of looser ways I've used industrial images. You know, sometimes I'll go out and I'll take, you know, five or six photographs of an industrial area here in Rhode Island where my mill building is. There's a lot of old mills that are being torn down or derelict. And so I'll go and take photographs, multiple photographs, and actually make collages out of those photographs that are a little more free form, and that might be something that you would enjoy. But what I want to show you is how you might use industrial shapes, industrial images to make something that might even have more abstraction or more variation through cubomania. First I'm going to show you the process and then we're going to do it together so you can see how I might work with it. All right. I really need basically a Sharpie, a dark pencil, some scissors, a ruler and some glue. Also an image, a little bit of tracing paper, which you'll see in a moment. It's really simple in terms of materials to do this. This image here is going to be the example image. And then I'm going to do another image for the whole process. But this is a photograph I took in India. It has some organic shapes, but it's also got some hard lines and industrial shapes. I took that image, actually took a smaller version. I cut it. I took a section and cut it up. And I made a bunch of little squares out of that image. Here are my little squares. I cut it up into sections. I took those squares. I just made a whole bunch of different versions of it. Like different possibilities. That might be a possibility. I took a photograph, I could make another possibility by like a puzzle, shifting these pieces around. Took a photograph, another one took a photograph. This is a way, this image here, the realistic image, could become, again, an image generator. An abstract image generator. Something that was born from something hard edged. Something where you're actually using a hard edged technique to relate it to itself in different ways and create new forms. So you could make collages in this way and say, this is my outcome. I really like this idea of cubominiaI. You might arrive at a certain configuration and say, that's my collage, I'm going to glue it down. Or you could just keep these pieces, which I actually do. I never really glued them down. Keep these pieces as a way to continue to experiment and create images. Because if you do that, there's a possibility of actually of the making tracings of the images which could potentially turn into drawings and then those could potentially turn into paintings. So there's a possibility of as you look ahead, of using some of these images in new ways and perhaps having this practice of just assembling shapes again and again feed other media that you might be interested in. That's some potential. That's sort of the process. But I want to hands on show you how I might approach this. So I'm going to put the example aside. I'm going to show you this photograph. I took this picture last summer out on Cape Cod, looking down into a fishing boat. I love the fishing boats because they have really beautiful colors and really strong shapes. So I took this picture and then with my Sharpie, I went in with a ruler and just sort of partitioned it off into nine squares. This is easier using squares. These are not like perfect squares, but if your image is a square to start with, it'll make it a little easier to associate it with itself again. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to cut out these squares. I'm going to actually put my original image up here so we can sort of see how playful this can be and see what we end up with. So I'm going to cut out the boundary because the white area really isn't going to serve me, so I'm going to cut that off using a Sharpie, depending on the image. You know you want to use a pen when you divide it up into shapes to play cubo mania, you want to use a pen that's going to show up so you sort of know where to cut it. All right, and put these aside. Then you can start to cut out your nine squares at first. I'm actually going to cut them out and sort of leave them in the order in the arrangement of the original. Just so we can see before and after as I cut them apart. Actually, what I also find interesting is that each one of these, you could divide each one of these again into shapes. Or each one of these little abstract sections of this image could be in and of itself an inspiration. There's a lot going on in just this little square, but we're going to work with the whole thing. So right now this is a cut up version of that. The pieces are laid more or less in the order that they are in the picture. But now it's time to play the game. Now it's time to play cubomania. We can start to place and shift things in a way that feel good to us. You don't have to know a ton about. We don't have to get all like intellectual about composition to know that when we move a shape, right? When we move a shape and place it down in relationship to another shape, that there is a conversation. Like I just moved this blue net up to this side. So suddenly I feel like there's almost like a sense of motion, like arcing through. And if I take this sort of wood beam and put it here, there's an echo happening. That's quite interesting to me. I'm just playing, I'm playing this game. I'm moving things around. I'm seeing where, you know, maybe by creating a new arrangement, this might become a possible abstract image that I find appealing. I like this arrangement at this point. I certainly could glue it down. That definitely could be something I could do. But as we saw in the last image, if I don't glue it down, it might be interesting to work in a way that has some variety. Ultimately to change it and make some variety out of it, I'm just going to quickly transfer this onto this paper and reveal my trace paper. The trace paper is really the next step. If you decide that you want to create multiple images out of this, I'm going to just put these up on the opaque paper and just arrange them just a little bit more. Great. And then I'm going to put this trace paper on top. You can see that these are not lining up perfectly. I'm not super concerned about that. You want to keep the grid as much as you can, but if they end up being a little bit off, that's okay. We are working with abstraction after all. You could glue them down. But I'm going to work with this a little bit more free form at this point. You can start to, so I'm going to actually create a little boundary around this. Just so that when I lift the trace paper, I know like where the edge of my image is, then the trace paper obscures the image a little bit. It makes it a little harder to see. I'm going to go in and I'm not going to actually draw the divisions between the pictures. I'm just going to pull out some major players, some major shapes that I find interesting here. I'm not also yet really thinking too much about how these things might hook up together. Even though when I laid the images down, I did make a note of like Mm, that shape could lead into that. But for now, I just want to work with the things that seem to be dominant. The shapes that seem to be dominant through the trace paper. Because I'm not working with every single detail. This actually, I feel like the trace paper is a little bit of a gift because it's really not allowing me to obsess about detail so much. You can be as painstaking, accurate, or detailed, or careful as you want with this. I enjoy that sometimes, but sometimes I also just enjoy working a little bit more rapidly and just picking out really key shapes. Because sometimes when you go too slow, you end up getting a little caught in thinking and arranging and planning. There's something about just letting it be fluid that can often, at least for me, be a way to work with things in a slightly more abstract, quicker way. I just have a few more to fill in here. I know we're all waiting for the big reveal. And also as shapes turn in space, this is already so abstract in my eyes. I have a sense that, yeah, it's an industrial image, but I don't almost know anymore. Like if you're just looking at this and didn't know where this was coming from, you might not know like, oh, that's the deck of a fishing boat. Like, it becomes a little bit more ambiguous. It comes a little bit more universal. That's also interesting to me in terms of image making. The way that abstraction can make an image feel a little more, a little more universal and then sometimes more accessible to people. Okay, basic shapes outlined. I'm going to take my grid and move it aside. Then I have these wonderful lines and shapes happening here. What I would like to do, I do have a little hint of where the grid comes in. I have a little hint of where the divisions are. The next thing I like to do is I'd like to start to just use what I'm feeling to connect some of these shapes. This is an industrial image. I'm actually interested here in possibly keeping the shapes pretty rectilinear or in the last one we worked with, we used a lot of curved shapes. And I'm wondering here what it might be like to work with straight lines. Because working with straight lines is what drives this image. And working with straight lines is what ultimately is going to give the character, I think that it was born from. So I'm just going to extend some of the lines. Close up some of these shapes a little bit. Bring it out maybe all the way to the edge. And you see that. You see why this boundary also is actually helpful because, you know, it terminates like these lines terminate at the boundary here we go. And just a couple more straight edges here. Yeah, I'm like in where this is going, again, I had no idea. I could not predict what this particular game of Cubo Mania, and I do play this game quite a lot. I couldn't really predict where this would ultimately go. But it is a wonderful way to make one, an abstract collage which could keep on configuring itself, but two maybe end up with a industrial style drawing. You could add color, you could make multiples of these based on multiple configurations. As we saw, it can be a really satisfying for me, it really heightens my curiosity about the possibilities of photography, the possibilities of collage, the possibilities of an image really being an engine that can keep working for you, collage is an amazing catalyst for that. 9. Outro: So in this course, we have explored collage in a lot of different ways. We looked at historical examples of collage. We looked at how to hand paint your own papers. The difference between papers, the difference between cutting versus ripping. How you can create variety and excitement by exploring an expanded color palette in terms of the colors you might choose. And we also explored the possibilities of working with remnants of process, working with things that were left behind. Working with things that were left over, this is really, I think, an incredible thing to be aware of. Just notice that rather than throwing something away that actually could be repurposed Also. In that same vein, this idea of using consumption as inspiration like what is in my recycling bin, you know what is coming through the mail slot? You know, what are things in my everyday life that I could repurpose to make collage out of. So I think collage is an incredible avenue for being playful, for being curious, for really changing things up. And creating variations that will keep you inspired for a lifetime.