Large Contemporary Abstract Collage - Painting Papers, Planning Out Composition, And More

1. Introduction: I love abstract art, probably more than most types of art. And so if you've been on my channel for awhile, you've seen all the different ways that I like to experiment with all my supplies. Coming up with different abstract techniques and different colors and different sizes and different compositions. And I truly enjoyed the whole process of playing with paint and creating abstract art. And today we're going to be creating some rather large pieces of contemporary collage art. And I'm calling them contemporary because they are a little more urban, maybe a little less cutesy. There. They kinda elevate a little bit more to fine art things that you'll want to mount and maybe frame and hang. Things that you can take to your gallery and cell. These are really exciting, the things that we'll be doing in class today. I'm Denise love and I'm an artist and photographer in Atlanta, Georgia. And today I'm gonna show you how to do some large pieces of contemporary abstract collage art, basically where we're going to paint some of our own collage papers. We're going to be cutting and gluing and creating beautiful large urban ask type collage art. And I'm pretty excited to go through the different elements with you. We have a whole section that we're gonna do on composition. So that will kind of brainstorm out some of our compositions before we get to cutting out our big pieces of paper. And I think you're going to really enjoy creating some of these for yourself. So definitely come back and share something with me. I can't wait to see those. And some really excited to have you in class today. So let's get started. 2. Class Project: Your class project today is to come back and show me some of your collage pieces. I love seeing what you painted, what papers that you might have chose if you found some handmade papers, whether you decided to go a little smaller than I went in class today or go great big, because I think it's exciting sometimes to scale up and see what challenges those present compared to little pieces. And how do we overcome those challenges to make interesting pieces of art. So I'm looking forward to seeing what you came up with, the compositions that you chose to use. So come back and share those projects with me. I can't wait to see them. I'll see you in class. 3. Supplies: Let's talk about the supplies that we might consider using for our large abstract pieces. So I've got a separate video talking about different handmade papers and stuff that we might consider. So you want to check that out? And I've told you where some of these handmade papers came from, but I'll just mention it again. A lot of these came from. We find one that's got a tag on it. So the handmade papers I get from the art store. But you can get most of the ones that are really love and that I have here in my pile at G, P, C papers.com. Gee, isn't girl P as in Paul, C as in cat papers with an S.com, GPC, papers.com, a few. And that's where I guess the art store is getting all these different handmade papers. But I like the selection. I like some natural fibers pieces. Those are fun. If you can make something that looks really cool like that with paint, that would be fine too. You can just basically paint some layers and drag through. So you could create things that look like something like this. If you don't want to go get some papers. I also love these, have the hole in them. They're so beautiful and bigger pieces and in collaged pieces. And that one's from that same source. Also love this particular piece because it looks like brown paper, which is what we're using. And it's a pattern just used with stencil maybe and some cream colored paint. This you could very easily replicate something like this on our brown paper. And I just wanted to show it to you to put that idea in your mind. If you had a favorite stencil that you wanted to create a big pattern out of beautiful, beautiful kind of thing to create. I also want you to keep some packaging and see if you can come across any type of like corrugated cardboard, anything with a pattern, anything you get delivered that has something cool like this in it. Keep it and definitely gonna be using this peace in class. Now, you could also maybe tear apart some cardboard. If a regular box, the inside of the thickness is corrugated, maybe you could tear apart a box if you just can't find a pretty piece of corrugated that's like this. So get creative there and see what you got, what's coming in the mail, what packing supplies you might save. Because I loved those. We're also using brown craft paper. Now this is just a roll of brown paper that I got at the art storage, just brown craft paper. You can also get paper bags from the grocery store. This could also be packaging paper that comes with some brown paper in it. So any source of brown paper is fine. I went ahead and got a bigger role of it because I liked the brown paper look. We can just sew it and paint on top of it or we can use the brown is the surface. It's a nice, large, papery surface that we can use, especially for larger pieces of art. And it's not very expensive, especially if you save your packaging. So these pieces of paper that I have down on a table or ones that we just saw in class. And I have, I'm white gesso and I have some clear gesso. And the reason why you want to just so the paper is because the gesso primes the paper. It's like a paint primer. It's going to make your paint stick to the paper a lot easier. It's going to keep the paint from soaking through and saturating it and maybe disintegrating it because, you know, craft paper is pretty thin. And we want this surface to hold up to whatever we're doing to it. So prime the paper and if you have clear, then you can prime one of your pages clear. If you have the white, compare it, prime your pages white. I like to have clear and white, so I have both that I've done here. We also could be using any of our paints that we love. So your choice there on what paint you pull together. I've got these big Liquitex basics colors. I've got some inks that I might like to use. Acrylic inks. I've got heavy bodied paints I could be using, you could be using craft paints, really the sky's the limit here. Just have some of your favorite paint products available. Also, a little variety of paint brushes. We're going to need those to be creating some designs on our piece. You also want to have some type of glue. So the gel mediums are glue products and they are art glue products. And a better quality than like your craft glue products like your mod podge. So if you are just Googling the page to the surface like we're gluing these down to our paper surface for instance, mod podge is fine if you've got it, I liked the map mod podge, not the gloss. But if you're gonna be using any gel medium on top of any papers where you might then want to paint on top of that. Then you want to use an art gel medium rather than the mod podge because they're meant to be painted on top of and they're better quality. And they're going to hold up better in areas that you're going to see. This is if you're doing it where you won't see it, we're just glue on our stuff down the gel mediums or where you will see it. Again, I like Matt. I happened to have gloss here in the thicker and so, you know, if it's in a bottle like this, it's pretty thin. That's in a bottle like this. It's pretty thick. And depending on what we're glue and down, you might rather have a thicker medium, but I do have both available if we need it. The other option is yes paste, but I'm not sure I'll be using that today for anything other than the really heavy pieces of cardboard or heavy pieces of paper. Because it's very heavy, it's a very thick paste and it might be just too hard to get it on very large surface compared to those heavier pieces. So I'm going to save that for just important spots. So you need some type of glue. I've got some scissors handy, I've got some pallet paper handy. And then anything else that you can think of that you might need to paint, create. Definitely grabbed that out of your art stashes. This is the time to play and experiment and create some pretty papers. Alright, so that's most of the supplies I'll be using in class. I don't promise I won't sneak something else going on you because who knows has we're going how much you get inspired by different things. But that's my plan so far. I've got some water over here for my paint brushes if I need it, and then I think we're ready to start creating some papers. So I'll see you back in class. 4. Collage Surface Options: Let's talk about different surfaces that we're going to do our large collage contemporary piece on top of. So I want to go large and you can certainly start small and get bigger. And you can even start with a much smaller nine by six, half, half a sheet size to do like your sample pieces or to have smaller pieces as part of your collection. And I'm going to do maybe a smaller piece thinking about stuff. We'll see. Um, but I've got some very large paper pads here that I randomly just have gotten women when they're on sale or I've gotten them in the past and then maybe used a few sheets out of it and then they went in the closet and I don't normally work this big like this biggest pad here. So I just happened to still have it. And what's good about these is projects like this. So this 11 by 15, that's the smallest of these three pads I'm looking at also have 12 by 18, which would be a wonderful size for doing these. And then I also have 18 by 24, which really I kinda wanna do a big one, C. And if you like working on paper and you wanna be able to store these, then definitely work on paper. I like these Canson extra large watercolor paper pads because they're a £140 weight paper in the pad, which is a really nice weight of paper and it will hold us gluing things to it. And it will look nice when we're done. So I like this a £140 paper because it's sturdy and it's a good surface for us to be collaging and gluing things too. And if you think you don't know if you're going to like it or not. And you don't want to work on say, a cradle board right from the very beginning, which is another surface we could be working on. I've got lots of these just stashed that the bigger ones just never got used. And you'll notice like one of these, this is 18 by 24 board. And that bigger pad of paper that we just saw was 18 by 24 paper. And one of my favorite things to do is to create on paper. And then if the piece is so amazing that I'm like, Oh, that's amazing. Worthy of being hung up. And I finished piece. And maybe I want it to be on a board rather than something flat like a paper because I don't want to Matt it and put a frame around it in that respect, then you can take this big piece of paper and attach it to this big board. And now you have a board, a piece that's, you could paint the sides and that's ready to hang. You could do the little wood frame around it and finish it off if you wanted to do that. So I do like creating on paper before creating onboard. And if I'm going to use a board, rather than risk ruining the board, I will create on paper and then glue something to a board to finish it off. So you might consider that if you're thinking all cradle boards expensive, I don't want to work on cradle board. Don't work on paper. And if you've got something that's so amazing, it deserves to be mounted to a board, then mount it to a board. So I've got a couple of these just kind of in my stash ready to be used. If I decide that one of these is amazing, another surface, and you'll see I've had these for awhile. I've even painted on the outside cover of these at 1 or another. This is pretty fun. This is canvas panel. And you can get these in some fun shapes. This is 12 inch by 24 inch. I like how it's long and Finn, and this could be a super cool shape for collage, abstract like we're doing. So consider canvas panel. If you've got canvas panel, you can also work on canvas if you want to work on Canvas for your pieces. And again, I personally loved work on paper. And if the piece is just crazy amazing, I like to mount it to something to finish it off. But you work however you feel comfortable. And these are the different surfaces that you might think about using. If you've just got any around in your art supplies, you might pull those out and see what you're going to use today. So just kind of a rundown of different services you might consider. I always like to work on paper if I don't know if I'm gonna love a piece or I'm just not sure if this is the direction I want to go with different things. So consider getting a couple of bigger pads of paper. You can cut the pieces down to do smaller artwork if you need to. And then you've always got paper that you can use like I can cut this into other sizes. Bigger sheets are usually cheaper than smaller pads. So consider getting a big pad and cutting it into smaller sheets if you're looking to save on your budget there too. But I'd kinda in my mind like to do a real big one. And maybe this 11 by 15 is some pieces in class. So we'll see, we'll see what we get to just kinda show any of the options. And I do like the heavy thickness of the £140 paper. Alright, so you could also use, I've got watercolor paper. You could also use mixed media paper. Just make sure whatever paper you get is nice, heavy weight so that it'll hold up to us adding stuff to it. Alright, I'll see you back in class. 5. Collage Paper Options: So let's talk about some different papers that we want to be using in this class. So I have got a roll of craft paper that I'll be using to paint on to create some of our pieces. And I like the craft paper because it comes in large sizes and it's pretty inexpensive. You can use any kind of brown paper, grocery bags. You could use lunch bags, you could use packing paper that comes in packages. I think that's where I started with the brown paper with some packaging. So save all of that stuff that you get in the mail. And we can use that in projects like this. With the brown paper. I am priming this before I start painting on it so that, that surface is going to accept the paint without a lot of trouble bleed through tearing of the paper, that kind of thing because kraft papers pretty thin. And while I'm not going to be layering, layers and layers and layers of water and what material on here. I do want this to stand up to whatever it is. I decide to paint on it. So I've got a sheet painted were clear gesso. And that just drives and gives me a surface with the brown paper showing through. I've also got several pages that I painted white. And you'll notice that this is more of a shabby white. It's not on as a solid layer. I didn't want it to be like super solid. I wanted to see brown peeking through. I wanted to add to my overall feel of the piece when I'm done. So I have really sloppily painted three sheets of this which I may or may not use. I might tear some into smaller pieces, and I want to do different patterns and shapes and colors on these pieces to use in my bigger art piece. So I've also collected, and I want you to start being on the lookout for this. Also collected corrugated cardboard. This came in some packaging. Like I think it was some books that I ordered. But it came in the packaging and as soon as I saw it, I was like, Oh, I have to keep this. It's one of my very favorite things to cut pieces out of this and do mark-making. It's also for bigger or collage work like we're gonna do in this class, this texture is going to be amazing as an element in our art. So I love this. This is corrugated with straight irrigations. This one will go this one. Another favorite came in some packaging. I didn't buy it. But you came by corrugated cardboard. You can look on Amazon or look online for corrugated cardboard, corrugated cardboard pieces and get some interesting options. But it's not as cheap as craft paper, like you can get craft paper at the art store pretty cheap. The corrugated cardboard comes in big, big roles, usually because they expect you to be using it as packaging. So I would be on the lookout for anything you order any kind of packaging, anything that has some support in the box holding the item, keep that stuff because this, again is another favorite mark making tool of mine, so I just cut pieces off of it to use with different paints and elements. It's also a different favorite pattern and 3D element for something like we're gonna do today. So save these. And also pulled out my stack of handmade papers because I thought it's possible that I might want to use an element that I didn't paint hard, didn't collect for free or I didn't just have or maybe I just wanted to color specific, pretty easy to get or maybe I just wanted a handmade element in there. These came from the art store. And most of these papers you can find came from G, P, C, papers.com. So g is in girl, p is in papers C as in cat, papers with an S.com. So you should be able to, if you don't have access to the art store, you don't see any handmade paper is local to you. You could check out the GPC papers.com and see if these have some that you could just order or if they have a stock list where they can direct you to find pretty handmade papers from because some of these are fairly amazing. And I've had people in my other collage classes be like, Oh, where did you get that? And if you just say the art store where you may have available something similar or you might not. So at least there's an online option. So I love having some papers that have texture. They have different things in here creating the paper. It's like different fibers and stuff and then paint on top. So I love this because of the color. I love this because of the color and the different elements that are in it. So that's a really pretty one. These are some of my very favorite. They're the ones that are. Basically shear. And they've got holes and different patterns. And these are some of the ones that people have been like. Where did you get that? And still has the tag on it. So these are the GPC papers.com. And then you can get some of these wonderful 3D feel as an element that we can put on top of maybe another element as to add to the dimension. I love this piece. Just, it's just a white piece of paper. Pretty kinda teal. This is pretty because you can see flecks of other stuff in it. Not necessarily going to use all of these. I like this because of the pattern on the front. I've just I just have a whole stack of parties that I have found at the art store over the years and saved. And I thought, let's pull some of these out and maybe use them because look at the pattern on this one. Look how beautiful that is. It's amazing. And going like this could be a good one for today. I also like these that are kinda fibrous, but you can see through them That's really pretty. This is a really pretty like stencil pattern on a brown craft paper. You can actually see through this one. So this might not be brown craft paper, but it is a good idea going forward for the brown craft paper pieces that we're doing, you can stencil a big pattern on your brown craft paper. And we can make something that looks similar to this with just kind of an ivory colored paint and a stencil and that brown paper. So keep in mind to any favorite stencils that you have that you feel might look good on the whole piece that we can then tear. That's a great idea. Pretty Brown with a texture. I love all the texture on this texture again, I love that texture. Look at this. This is a natural kind of grass kinda elements so it's see-through. So you can see like with that orange underneath it, how super cool that is. That would be a great kind of textural element for our piece. And we might, we might pull that out and use something like that. It doesn't have a tag on it, but I'm pretty sure all of the papers are coming from the same place because every single one that has a tag on it has that web address. This orange for some reason I really like oranges. Look at this paper, another white, kind of amazing holy fibrous kind of pattern. These are my favorite and I should go back and see if there's any new ones that I need because I truly love these. These are beautiful, displayed on your wall, not even cut up into something. This is cool because it's got a lot of texture. Another one, the top side is the side here. Again, you can kinda see through it. It's very fibrous, it's white, it's got that really cool texture, cool texture on here. So I have pulled out my stash of the handmade papers. I find them exciting. I want to use some of these possibly in these larger abstract pieces and encourage you to go take a look at the art store or check out the website for these and just see, you know, is there a piece that you think, oh my goodness, that would definitely make my piece of art the most amazing it could be. And I have to have it and just grab a one. Just grab one. You don't have to have a whole stack like I've got this has many different visits to the art store or I've thought I need some more handmade paper, even though, as you can see, I seem to collect them other than actually use them, then just Ou and all over them. So my goal in this class is to actually use some of these beautiful handmade papers that I've collected. So here is your assignment here on the papers, we're either going to get brown craft paper. And just so those, we're going to paint different patterns on them. And keep in mind when your pattern painting. Maybe get your favorites tinsel and create some type of all over pattern that would be pretty amazing. That's another option for you there. Also look at any kind of packaging. You might even go to some local stores, maybe the grocery store, the bookstore and say, Do you have any packaging that you're throwing away that's got some corrugated cardboard. Maybe they can give you some different options. Keep your mind open on where some of these elements might come from. And so you start gathering and then we will get to painting. And if you don't want to have handmade papers, you can certainly just stick with a textural element of some kind. That could be fabric, that could be paper, that could be corrugated cardboard. Some type of textural element is super cool in big contemporary collage looking pieces of art. And then we'll be painting some, maybe get a few of your stencils together if you want to create some of your own big patterns. And then we'll be ready to start tearing paper after we paint some of these up. Alright, I'll see you back in class. 6. Prepping Collage Paper To Paint: So let's get started by prepping some of our papers. So I've just got a roll of the craft paper and I've just kinda roll it out about the width of my table. And I'm cutting out that size because I think it's big enough that I could do anything with it. Because these are larger pieces. If you want to work on smaller pieces, then definitely work on something that would work on the smaller pieces. But I'm gonna do great big pieces today. So I think this is going to be big enough to get me some great collage sized pieces. And I'm going to start I'm putting just so on these papers and priming them. So the gesso is going to let my paper stay in good shape no matter what it is that I'm trying to paint on top of it. It gives me a good surface to paint on. And I'm not being super exact here. I want it to be slightly messy because I feel like this little pattern that I'm adding in here with this gesso. Painting it on kinda sloppy. It's going to add to the overall feel and look of the collaging of the collage papers that I'm creating of the painting I put on top of it. I want it to be hello, rough. If you want it to be exact and beautiful than, you know, take more care. But I feel like this has gone to add to the field that I want to get today. So I'm just roughly painting probably three sheets or so. And that'll give me enough to be able to do some painting on these several. Maybe I could even cut these in half and then I have maybe six different things I'm going to paint on here, line, stripes, dots, whatever. And then I'll be ready to tear these up to create my large contemporary piece. So I'm just roughly getting this paint on here. I've done, I'm gonna do three this size or so that are white. Gonna do one that is clear so that some of my painting can be on the brown background that we've got here. And then we'll be ready to tear and glue. This is going to be super fun today. I'm really excited to be starting these. So go ahead and get a couple of these sheets kinda primed up and drawing. And then we'll be ready to move on to the next part. 7. Painting Some Collage Papers: Alright, so I am just going to start creating different things here on our paper. And I have my pads of paper behind me because I might want to keep in mind that if I cut these into sections to do different patterns out of them, what size paper am I possibly going to be using? And I want to make sure I've got pieces big enough to cover like maybe two-thirds of a sheet. So I've got those kinda sitting behind me so I can think about things. And I wanted to just kinda create with abandon. I'm not trying at this point to create a whole bunch of very specific exact designs for a peace of God in mind. Because I'm creating for pieces that I don't know what I might want. If you do enough of these and you're like, I want a whole series and I want it, this, this, this, and this. Then definitely be more specific in how you want to create. I'm going to cut these into big enough to get at least a whole third, if I need it, small enough to really let me paint lots of different things. These have now been painted long enough that they are starting to dry or they are dry, not starting to dry up. Painted these. Let's just cut them off. I'm just going to cut all of mine. You don't have to. I'm going to head up these into different sheets for different patterns and stuff. You see I had three white pages and I had one clear page so that the brown is showing through. I'm just going to get these ready to start painting stuff on them. Now we're ready. I don't want to be exact. I'm kinda thinking, you know, I'm kind of thinking I'd like a big piece with some blue or something on it. And so I've got some ink here and I'm kinda wondering, I've got Payne's gray and I've got indigo. Let's do then indigo and maybe the ink on here. And come back with some water. I can spread this around. Look how beautiful this color is. So pretty. And I'm not trying to create a specific anything at this point. I'm just kind of just going with the flow here. It can move the paint around, could paint a specific pattern or design on it if I'd wanted to. Maybe I just want this color more than anything. Let's get some more of that out there. The reason I'm using the indigo on this particular piece because of the ink because because I don't have indigo in a thicker paint. So if you've got like your best color in say an ink rather than a heavier bodied, just use what you got. Not a big deal. This is gonna be really cool though. On top of this white, I'm Shannon through once this dries, I don't want it to be one big solid color. I kinda like these differences. And since we're doing kind of abstract, yummy stuff, I want, I just wanted to kinda do its thing and see how it dries. So we'll see once you get a color on top of here, we can then put something on top of that too. If you wanted to come back with say, white dots or a pattern or a stencil. You could keep going on top of this. Really want to see what I can get, not overdoing it, because sometimes I'm going to do too much. And let's see if we can get keeping it a little simpler. So kinda got this filling in a lot of the areas, got a few areas that are gonna be a little darker. Just doing what feels good in the moment. You don't have to do exactly what I'm doing at all. Just seeing, just letting this kind of take me where it's going to take me. Alright, so let's before I spill this everywhere, I'm terrible about dumping the inks over. I got to put that lid on. Okay. So I'm gonna go ahead and let this dry and do its thing. And let's do something else. So I am actually really loving this indigo. I'm kinda wondering if we don't do some stripes with the indigo, maybe that would be cool. So let's just do some stripes out here and see, you know, what that might look like. I've got a great big paintbrush here, so I've got to work a little looser. If you'll go when you're going bigger, use bigger tools, you know, backup from your work. Hold the brush back a little further. Try not to be so exact and so precious about it. I'm trying to trying to get stuff everywhere. It's gonna get that off the table. There we go. I need some paper towels over here. I'm I'm not at my regular desk where I'm normally painting. I'm at the bigger one because we're going bigger. But try not to be so exact and controlling, Don't be so precious. Paint some of these and rather than saying, Oh, I don't know if I like that or whatever, just paint some and set it to the side, this is gonna be a part of a bigger something. Doesn't have to be perfect. Because when we cut these and put these together in a gigantic kinda collage thing, you're gonna get excited. Alright, so I love that. Hello, I'm the blue. Almost wondering if I want some blue dots or if we wanted to just say that's all for the blue. Let's just set these on the floor. Hopefully I won't walk on them. And maybe we want to do something. I really like this kind of blue-gray by the Liquitex. And since I'm on a little blue kick there with the inks, what if we take some of this blue and do some kinda circles? You know what we could do while we're doing these circles. We could come back and kind of do more than one color. Like I could throw some ink on here and then kind of work that in some. So we've got kind of a secondary color shannon through without it just being the one shade. That's fun. Look at those. Those are beautiful. All right, let's go with that. I liked that doesn't have to be perfect. I like that. Let's see. Let's do that in the floor before I step on it. Alright, so let's see what else we got here. Maybe we'll, we'll come in maybe with some pink. I like this pink, like maroon. I might need to pull out kind of a maroon ink. So let me go look at my inks and I might pull out a burgundy color, so I'll be right back. All right. Now I've got some pink and purple and burgundy. And I'm kind of thinking, what if, what if we paint? What if maybe I want to drag? I'm not sure how burgundy this burgundy is. I've also got some purple over here. This is Amsterdam, while it is permanent. So let's just get some order in here. And kind of let that do some fun stuff. Look at that. That is doing some fun stuff. And really the, the less planned out and more organic you get some of this stuff in my mind, the better the piece ends up in the end, because it's less planned to less precious. You're not trying to be exact. You're just kind of going with it and seeing what you get. Alright, let's do this one down and let that dry. What if we do a whole piece and then do white dots on top of it, this has got some water on it. There we go. So maybe a whole pink piece and then maybe some dots. I don't know. Let's see here I'll just get this going. And again, I'm not looking for perfection. I'm not trying to cover every inch of this. Maybe we do part with that in part with some pink dots would if we did the hat. I could just cut this and use it. I don't know where we're going to put this. It's not like I've got a specific composition laid out, given myself options. And if you do this and then you've got a big long piece and you think, Oh, I need a much bigger piece of this kind of design. You can come paint some more. You're not limiting yourself to oh, no, I can't use that. You just come paint another piece. Don't don't make it hard on yourself. I want you to go fast. I want you to be kind of just thinking on your feet. I don't want you to go. Okay. I'm not scared to try whatever it is that we're thinking. Okay, So I've got some parchment which is kind of a white Minnesota different white. Then other white. And my my paint my paint water is very dirty, so that's okay. We're just trying to alright, so what if we do? Look at that? I do like the parchment on this paper, it's really on this pink. That's a pretty color. I'm kinda like in that there. Alright, We're let that one dry. We could do. Kind of feeling like I've got a real dark Payne's gray paint here, that's the dark is prettiest. This is the Grumbacher, Payne's gray and it's almost a black, it's so dark. Kinda feeling like I want some of that on yummy paper. So I'm going to clean my brush out. I'm going to get into this Payne's gray. And I really want this on my corrugated cardboard here pretty good. And I'm going to get it on the top. I'm going to just see, I might cut this corrugated cardboard into different strips sizes to use or I may use the whole thing who knows on one piece will see. This could be like a little, final little piece that we use as a, has an accent. We could do this in black. If you don't have this yummy gray, Payne's gray, you can do black. Black is gonna be even a little more stark and dramatic. And maybe that's what you're looking for. And if you go to use it and you haven't put enough paint where you wanted it, you can always add more paint. I'm gonna just kinda get this. We'll call it prepped for when we want to use it. And then we'll see we can always add more paint on top when I'm feeling like I want this to be painted in like this. So we'll see. We liked it. Some more of that out. Some of the Payne's grays aren't dark enough. Like to me, Payne's gray. It's like a black blue, like it's real dark. And it's really got some nice contrast versus a blue. And some of these look more like their royal blue instead of that deep dark color. So let's go with that. Let's throw that down and let it dry that stuff everywhere. Hopefully, I'm not painting on top of. I didn't mean to. And another thing that we could do is we could drag through, we get paint this and drag something through it as a pattern. So let me get something to drag. It's kinda random, but I've got some fun palette knives that have shapes on them. You can use silicone tools, anything that really grabs, you know what, if we do this? Let's see, we've got some pink stuff, we've got some black stuff. What if we do this in this crazy green? Just get another brush. Keep trying to use the same brush because I like it. But we'll just go ahead and grab another brush because there's too much paint going on there. Look at this. This is like the green gold. And before that gets to dry, let's just go ahead and drag this through it and make a pattern. Oh yeah, look at that. Got a little brush. I've got a microfiber cloth over here. I can wipe that off with. Sometimes I really love this color and sometimes I'm like, I want to love this color and I can't stand it today. I'm loving it. I really liked the green, the pink, and the gold. So I'm hoping that maybe I can get this thrown in there a little bit somehow into one of them we'll see. Don't, don't despair if you don't end up using all of the pages that you are painting on this little round. Go for it. Just paint on. And no, if you don't use them today, maybe you're using tomorrow. That's why I like using craft paper. It's a big role. It's really cheap. Like it, that's fine. All right. I like that. Let's see. Let's put that in some water on the ground to do its thing. Got a couple more things that we can paint. So I'm gonna go ahead and just kinda paint these up and see what it is that I want to do. So I want you to kind of grab all your craft paper pieces and just start experimenting. If you want to do a stencil piece, do a stencil piece with the pattern all over it like that paper, like the handmade paper piece we were talking about. Let's see, I've got it sitting right over here, but let's move this paint out of the way. If you want to go for stencils and try to create something like that, that'd be really cool. I'm going to use my handmade paper if I do end up using something. But that's a really cool thing to do. You could also do your own version of something like this. If you don't want to go get any of the handmade, you could do shades of brown and cream and you could do some type of Chrissy cross pattern like that, that would be cool. So go ahead and start painting color stripes, lines dragged through some paint and just see what it is you can come up with. And then we're going to start putting some of our pieces together in a collage. So I'm gonna go ahead and paint some more of these. And then I'll see you back in class. 8. Composition: All right, before we start making our big collages, let's talk about composition. So I've got a piece of paper out here, and we're just going to draw out some composition ideas to just kinda start our brains kinda going. So these, there's about a three by five mat here. They got the craft store. And we're just going to draw out some ideas. And I'm thinking, I'm going to use my bigger pieces. I want to make several pieces. I don't want to just make one piece and call it a day. That's why I want to brainstorm some ideas here with you. So I'm thinking of all my collage pieces are gonna kinda follow the rule of thirds. The rule of thirds is, is you're basically breaking and I'm kind of guesstimating size here, but you're breaking your page up into thirds. Top third, the middle third, the lower third. And when we think with wise, the third here on the left, third here in the middle, the third here on the right. So you can measure it out and get real exact if you want. Malicious draw ourselves a grid. About our third lines. Have to be exact, but that's basically what the rule of thirds is. You're breaking your page up into third, third, third, third, third, third. And where these pieces combined are your interests points. So like if I'm taking a photo, I want to line up, say My person's head and maybe the eyeball on one of these points that kind of makes it obvious to the viewer that person's head is the most important part of that composition. In a case like this, where we're doing collage piece and composition, I want to use this rule of thirds so that I can keep my composition really interesting. I don't want to have like things just smack down in the center for no apparent reason. It's usually not very interesting if you don't know why you're doing it. And you only want to break the rules when you understand the rules. And so we're gonna go four rules of thirds. And the most obvious composition would be say, a landscape kind of composition where you either break it up at the bottom or at the top. And then maybe we put one big collage piece down here at the bottom. And then I'm thinking at the top while I want to break that up too. So maybe I want to break that up on the rule of thirds and put a big piece here on two-thirds of the paper and then more here on 1 third of the paper. And that could be my most basic composition. And then if I were to throw on some interesting thing on top, then I would probably want to cross over this line of the thirds where I'm creating the interest already by having two different materials and a third material. And if I wanted to put something on top of that, I might do that right here on top of that third line and make this my most interesting spot for the viewers eye to go towards. So that could be one way that we do that. This could be another way. Maybe I'll break it up into thirds again. Third on the bottom, and then two-thirds, 1 third here on the top. And then maybe even break this section or this section into third, third, third for up top. And maybe put my interesting extra collage element right here in that third. So that could be another idea for us. Another idea could be maybe we break it up into thirds. So I have one collage paper to collage paper, three collage paper. And maybe I want the interest to be something I've got on top, maybe a handmade paper or something. On this rule of thirds line here, kind of in that spot. I don't want it put it in the center. I want to put it slightly to the left or slightly to the right so that we really get the interests that we're trying to focus on. So I like that. So another thing that we could maybe do is break it up into a third coming this way and maybe break this side. And two thirds, like right here. So we haven't broken the whole top or bottom into a third. We've split that into a third and two-thirds, and then split this into a third and two-thirds. So super interesting there. And then if we needed to have even more interest on this, we could even layer, say, a second piece of something on top of that and have that extra element, pop it up. I like that. Another thing that we could maybe do is break it up into thirds. So collage paper 123 and then have something else completely on top of all of that. Maybe that Is kind of at a diagonal and completely throws our composition into something more interesting. So how super fun would that be? Let's just grab another piece of paper. Let's set this one right here beside us, and then we can do some more. So let's just come up with three more. And then you have got some direction on how to lay out your collage pieces. And then you've almost got like half the work done for you because trust me, when you're doing collage, especially little collages and big collages. It doesn't matter This tiny bit. Prep work and ideas, brainstorming. Like what kind of compositions am I thinking? You're gonna be able to now refer back to this forever. And on this project we've just made it so much easier. So let's just break this one up again on a third. Let's say we break this up on a third. So you've got the smaller size and the two-thirds. And over here, we did. We broke the smaller part into another third. So let's break the larger part on this one into another third. And now we've got that extra, Let me get that as one line so that we're not confusing ourselves, but now we're here. We had the extra on the smaller side. Here we're letting the smaller side stay solid and we're breaking up the larger size. How fun is that? Another fun thing that we might consider? And this is kinda throwing us, but let's just split the paper in 1.5 collage element to collage element. But let's not the interests be in the third of the halves. So now we have something different up here and something different down there. And we have still rule of thirds, broke it a tiny bit with a center line. We've come back with the thirds for the interest points there. I think that's pretty fun. Another thing that we could do is we could break this up. And we had one piece where we were kind of coming up here up the mountain basically with a piece on top. You can kinda do that here. With this piece only this bottom piece could be the piece that's coming up. So now, instead of this being a third or fourth piece of paper on top, now, this bottom piece is our peace that climbs on this piece. We basically had three pieces of collage paper. And then we had a fourth piece as our piece on top. Here we can have one piece to piece. And the third piece is the one that we let encroach on the other pieces that we have on our piece. So that's super fun. So let's break another one up. Rule of thirds, come down on a third. And on here. What we could do is we could have something interesting on the top of our piece. Maybe coming further over like this, like even breaking this up by thirds and have two-thirds of the elements on the bigger piece, 1 third of the element on the smaller piece. That's different than the other ones we did where we put one right on the third line. It wasn't very big or a big one on the third line, and it took up more mass of our page. This one is a feature right there in the top center separated from our piece there. We could also do in that same kind of thing. Break this up. Maybe this is one piece of collage. Maybe this is one piece of collage. And we can break that up with something coming off the center, two thirds above the line, 1 third below the line. And that's our center kind of focal piece that we've got sitting right on top. I like that. Let's see one more or less. Think of one more that we could do. What have we not already done? So what if we already did that with the larger, kinda like that? Let's see. We could come all the way down as the third, third, third. And now we could break this up into several collaged pieces coming off the side. And maybe we have a little piece here, kind of separating the two. And then this be a great big piece that's dominating our collage. Or we could even have that possibly be two pieces of collage. So now we've come up with 678967891011 plus our rule of thirds. So now we have a dozen things that we could consider, give or take. And I want you to now have this available to look at. And I will PDF this so that you have print out that you can do. But I really like it if you take a piece of drawing paper and draw these out like I have kind of as your own cheat sheets. And then hang those up on the wall behind where you're creating. And now we have some good cheat sheets going forward for creating our big pieces. So I hope you enjoyed this little talk about composition today and the composition layouts that I am going to be focusing on. And then let's get started. 9. Pink Collage: Alright, let's jump into our first project. So I've got almost all my papers dry. There's two on the floor that had more ink on them where I was drawing just some big fake looking letters basically that are still sitting down here drawing. So we'll let them dry and we won't use them in this piece. I'm thinking that for the first piece, I'm going to start with my smaller paper that I'm using, which is the 11 by 15. And we drew our design on these pieces of paper like different ideas. I'm just going to draw on this piece of paper. I'm almost thinking. So we've got rule of thirds. So, you know, third, third, third, third, third, third. I'm almost thinking, let's kinda figure about a third of the way over. And I could measure this if you want to get real exact. And then maybe I want to come third of the way down as my piece that I'm gluing down here. And I might even want like something contrasting, like right there. So big piece of something, little piece of contrast, some type of collage paper and some type of collage paper. And that will be my piece. And I'm not going to worry too much about staying in the lines because I can always trim the piece when we're done. So I'm just going to put a piece out here. I'm going to use mod podge as my glue because I'm gluing craft paper down. I'm not going to be painting on top of it. And it's a nice thickness and some kind of feeling like that's the glue I'm going to use. I do have the yes paste over here and I have the matte medium, the gel medium if I need it. So just kind of looking at all the papers here that we painted. This is super exciting to see all these yummy bits all dry. Now it's time to start pulling the elements together and just creating some compositions. And I'm almost wondering if I wouldn't want this yummy pink as my like Power piece, basically. Maybe these little O's over here, super fun. And then what if I did my corrugated cardboard as my pop of punch down here at this bottom. So I'm kind of thinking that that might be the pieces I want to use. I really want an edge like this edge here to be my little bit of contrast that I drew out, like right here, I drew this a little bit of contrast. Wouldn't that be fun if it were a piece of this brown craft paper? So I do have the Braille craft paper that I could glue down. And then I could glue this right on top of that. Or I've got just really this brown craft paper right here that is already mostly cut. And I could put that down right there. If I wanted to just do that. It's already got a falling edge on it. So maybe that's what I'm gonna do when you do that. Maybe this on top, the circles underneath and he's a corrugated cardboard. So let's do that. Let's move all these other options for now. On the floor. Okay. Now we got some room. Got my piece of paper here. So I don't want to waste all this paper. So I do want to get fairly close in size to the piece I need and just kind of use that much of that paper. So I'm gonna go ahead. I'm all kinda a little bigger because when we're all done, we can flip our paper over and we could trim the edge out. So let's just cut that and trim it when we're at the end. Okay. So that's about where that would go. I do want to possibly use my corrugated cardboard for a large piece later. So just measuring out the side of large piece of paper there. I think I'm going to cut this down. Feel like I want this to be a large element on something, so we're going to save that. So you've got enough of the cardboard. So you can tell this came off of a box and packing material because it's still got the packing tape on it. And I don't even care. It doesn't matter. I don't want any hanging off the side though, so we'll get rid of that. And then so I've got about two-thirds oh, yeah. Look you there got about a third given tear. This it doesn't have to be cut. And even who, who Haha look at that. Then kinda laying it out how I want it before I start gluing down because it's gonna be hard to stick this on top of this. So kinda gotta get it in my mind. Which, which way we're going to glue these. Okay, So I'm feeling like this 1 first, this 1 second, this 1 third, that one on the top, and then we can trim it. So let's start that out and you can glue them. And I'm not going to be super careful. I want to get it all glued down, but I'm up on my table so I don't glue my table. That's why I'm sitting on this pad of paper. I just flipped it over to the back. I want some room here to be able to work. Okay. So I like this. I'll put that right there. Make sure I got enough. Going over the paper there. Nice. Hold that down for a second. We'll get that attached. Then. We'll go ahead and get this brown paper on. And it doesn't have to be exact. That's why I'm not worrying too much about getting it all over here. There we go. Let's put that one down. Turn the paper. Get someone to the rest of this paper here. We go. Not get that very straight. If we go. All right, there we go. Don't have to be perfect because we're putting another piece on top of this piece, but I do want it to be pretty close. I'd like it to be nice when we're done. Because I want to hang some of these up. Hankering to do some yummy, nice large collage for awhile. Some kind of wanting, want the pink to cut off. I don't want the edge there of this stuff here, the unfinished, I kinda want the pink coming right around like that. And this piece cutting off. So I'm gonna actually trim off my access, my access a little bit. Still kinda going over the edge. I want to be able to trim from the back when we're done. Kinda like when you're trimming, when you're doing a painting and you tape it off and you peel the tape and it reveals what it is. I feel like flipping this over and trimming it down is similar to revealing it with the tape peel. So I do want to have that where I can do that. Okay, so now I want this to overlap, like right there. I do have too much here, so let's just cut a little piece of this off right here. And I can save this for a little dash of something in a piece later. I'm almost feeling like the cardboard piece needs to go down last. Whoa, whoa, whoa, look at that. This is turning out super cool. That's exactly what I was hoping for. I want this kind of yummy deconstructed almost contemporary abstract thing that we can frame when we're done. Or mount to a cradle board. Paint those sides. Black wall. Hahaha, good. Is that going to look? I don't even mind that there's some texture under here with this piece that I've already glued down. Don't worry about the texture because there's so much paint and color and pattern kinda going on this top piece that I don t think will even notice that under there. And if we do, it's a little extra texture. Maybe will love it anyway. Alright, so let me just right on down. Oh yeah. Here we go. You can see it doesn't matter if there's any texture underneath that really because it's all going to blend. And when we got it glued down and it'll just look like a finished piece. I do want to make sure I have all my edges here. I don't want the edge popping up like this. So I'm just going to come and get the edges here. Then if you get any here on your paper, you could just take a little baby wipe and wipe any off if you wanted. I don't really want the glue to show, so that's why I just wipe that off. Hold this down for a second. And that will be good and attached. Who are looking good this book. So my goodness, Oh my goodness, even better than I had in my mind. She'll love it when a plan comes together. Jersey, that TV show than that one. That's the one with Mr. T. In it. That show it's 1818. Look there. I think I want that right there. And I'm kinda feeling no, I want it to really cut off sharp with this and stop with this. Or I want it coming over on the pink. And I really feel like I'm wanting a sharp cutoff with the brown paper. Maybe I say the brown paper because I don't know that I came far enough over otherwise. So let's let's get brave. Just be brave. Cut that right there. Oh yeah. Oh yeah, oh yeah. I'm filling that. Alright. Let's just get this glue down. Then we will trim it. Once you get your collage papers done and you get your composition ideas written down kinda where you can look up and say, what do I think? Then you start cutting and gluing. This part of the process goes pretty fast, doesn't it? I mean, this, which is zipped along and bam, we're almost done. I mean, how amazing is this piece? Crazy, crazy, amazing. Alright, let's get that glued down really good. Then what I'm gonna do is go and get my cutting mat and my exact dough knife. And we will flip this over, trim the edges, and we'll see what our first piece ended up as. Alright, so let me go get that and I'll be right back. Alright, I've got my cutting mat here so I can just cut right down on this. Got our piece that has dried for us. Now if you feel like you can just cut that with some scissors around there and there'll be even for you go for it. I'm actually going to go one step further. I've got a, got a ruler here. And I'm actually going to try my best with my exact dough knife to really stay straight as I can. I want this to be amazing when I'm done, so I don't mind the extra effort. If it works. Great. Great. If I cut off something I didn't intend. Well, still better than if I handed it probably who look at that. Okay, great. Now, I've got this piece of cardboard. I do want to trim this also. Oh, yeah, there we go. I might have to trim that with some scissors will see when I get that flipped over because that's the corrugated bit. Might've trimmed on my paper a little bit, but I tried not to do the best you can. There we go. All right. Let's do the next side. Alright, y'all feeling good about this. I'm feeling good. Feeling good. And these pieces that we've cut off don't throw those away. That could be another element that we use on another piece we've got That's a big enough piece to be a feature or Stripe somehow. Don't throw those out. Now this one is kind of questionable because that's where the edge of this corrugated stuff is. But let's just try to make it as straight as we can. Alright, let's see how we did. Alright, do, do, do, do, do, do, do. Look how good that is. Oh my goodness, look how good that is. Hall. That's amazing. Now if we managed that to board, painted the sides of black, that will be ready to hang. That's freaking beautiful. Beautiful. Alright, first piece. We could flip it over, take a look at it that way, see if we liked it better that way. These could also be hung this way, like this with this at the bottom to top. Oh my goodness. Perfect, beautiful piece. So at this point, I'm going to stop. I don't want this to have more and more on it. I want this to stand on its own as a piece. And then it can be framed just like that. Sign it here at the bottom. But if you feel like it needed extra marks, extra color, some other dynamic piece because there wasn't enough contrast. You can certainly continue to add to this as you need it. But for me, that's what I'm looking for right there. I've got color, I've got some shape, I've got some texture. I've got the pattern. I've got all kinds of elements going on in there, but they all kind of gel and blend without overwhelming each other. And your eye has different interesting places to go around and look at. So am crazy excited at how good that just turned out. Alright, so let's do the next piece. 10. Blue & Natural Collage: Let's do another composition on our medium sized paper. So I have peace paper that I've pulled out. This is the 11 inch by 15 inch size. And the last project we did was very similar to this layout here. And we had the big piece with the little piece of contrasting paper. And then we had a big piece here and then a little piece here at this bottom third. So I thought, well it might be really fun, is to do something similar to this layout where we have a big bottom piece, a big two-thirds piece, a one-thirds piece, and then some type of fun decorative element that we put in that. So this and this are very similar. And I thought might be the layouts that I'm feeling today for this project. So let's just see what we get. So I've pulled out some ideas, some different papers that we might consider. Remove these little pieces from yesterday out of the way. My ruler there, and I was thinking, was thinking maybe something dark and moody and yummy. And this is one of the pieces that I've painted yesterday that was still drying. And I basically painted the whole thing with the blue acrylic ink, the Indigo, and then came back with white acrylic ink and just drew some scribbles on it like implied writing. On these papers. I really did enjoy using the inks because this is another piece that was drawing. And what I did here was I painted the parchment paint color on the whole piece and then took the ink and just kinda ran it down the center and a little on the sides and then flipped it over and squished it together. And then let it dry and we'll get those really cool design that makes, I mean, super cool. And I'm feeling like I really love this whole section here. So what if we did this as our two-thirds and we'll trim it down to whatever fits in there. Maybe something like this handmade paper as the other 1 third, just kinda brainstorm. And here, so go with me. Maybe this as our larger dark piece at the bottom and then not fill in the dots. So let's put that one to the side. Then. What if we had a big handmade piece shape cut out on top of there. Now we may not like it by the end of this, we might change our mind. But kinda feeling that this morning, I'm kinda fill in that. So let's set the big piece to the side. And let's get us some paper size that we can work with. Some working with basically this much of the paper there. And I'm just thinking, I kind of want this section to be the dominant element here. So what I might do is go ahead and figure that that's the piece I'm going to use. Kinda want it to be down to here. So let's just commit. Be brave. That's gonna be my mantra through this class for myself and for you. Be brave. Did I cut off too much? I hope I did not cut off too much because I want that piece there, wanted to be about the bottom third. If it helps you out, you know, you could measure this. It's an 11 by 15 piece of paper. So if I said, you know, every five inches, 12345, here is the bottom third. And we can actually draw right on here because we're just pasting stuff right on top. And then we've got 11. We might come over to about right here. I'm going to call it like right here. It says, There we go. I like that 12, that's four squares. So technically that need to be 12 to be 444. But close enough, kind of feeling like about right here. Could be that. And so that's kinda what I'm aiming for size wise for the pieces on here. So let's see. Um, I don't mind if I overlap the brown going this way, but do I want the brown on top of say this, and then let that brown element be some contrast. And if I do that, don't want to tear that paper edge, can't be on that. I actually think I like this side a little better. So let's cut this piece about right here. And I'm just cutting some of these as we're going to get it get the extra out of the way. As I'm really sorting out what we want to do, kinda love that if we tear this edge and look a little more organic. Oh, you know what? That was dumb. I actually wanted this down here. Yay, it still fits. I wanted this up here. But now that I did that, do I really want that up there? I still think I want this up here. Still filling this. So let's just cut this one. When you're filming and talking and cutting things, sometimes they'll end up where they were supposed to. This is like the old measure, twice, cut once. But when you're talking, you take a little element out of there. You put an extra challenging little thing in there, some, okay, I'm really fill in the squares. I think I liked the squares because we're gonna put a contrasting element on top of here. So let's just, let's just think this through a second five to contrast it with piece of this paper. I do like this. The other option would be this at the bottom. Would this beside it? No, I don't like that. I like this at the bottom. So I'm actually going to, let's just, let's tear this. Like having the composition drawn on my paper now I know what I'm kinda working towards. I know where the papers are kinda going to sit. I could tear this edge so it's not even let's just try that. Oh yeah, now I'm fill it. Now. It's coming together for me. I'm overlapping the paper, but remember we can trim this up when we're all done. About the edge right there. Then. So let's alright, Let's just commit, were committing, committing our animal glue this down with mod podge. If I were using the mod podge on top of it and planning on painting on top of these pieces, I'd be using the Liquitex gel medium instead. And I will say whatever brush you use for your glue, that is now the glue brush. Don't. Then think that I'm gonna go wash this out and I can still paint with it. The glues basically ruin the brush I have discovered. So just be aware of that. You're probably not going to continue to use these after this. So pick a brush that's one-inch, a good size, It's a cheap brush. Does a cheap brush. I got at Michael's, I think it was 399, so $4. It's a good size. It's perfect for glue. Market your glue brush. And every time you wash it out, just set it to the side. That's your glue brush. You're not going to paint with it anymore. All right, so mod podge is drying over here a little bit. Alright, let's be fast. Let's just stick it down. Alright, I want this here. Oh yeah, beautiful. Stuck down. Beautiful. This kind of overlapping a little bit. I like that. It's not completely even that was on purpose. I don't want to get up under this edge right here. And if you do get mod podge on the top of your pieces, it's not a big deal. Mod podge is clear. So it's not gonna do anything, it's going to dry clear. I do have baby wipes here though because I would like not have a big glue bubbles sticking out. So I'm just going to wipe down any glue that hits. Just cause we on the top of the eye where on the top of the paper they're all account pretty, this is getting any edge there. Alright, now I want this one on top of these three. Deciding what piece you want, where is the hardest part? All the pieces look so amazing and so I'm looking at it thinking, I like this. No, no, I like this. I don't know. Maybe this It's like the hardest part. Because if you've already decided composition and you've already painted all the pages and stuff. You've done some of the hard decisions already there. Then you get to this. This is the, let's make the decision and commit to something that's the hard part. Alright, let's get this one. I want it to come up slightly because I'm not using any paints that will reactivate like watercolor or pastels that will smear. Since I didn't use any of that on there, using the baby wipe does not reactivate and change what we've already done. Okay, so that's pretty cool. Now, we have to decide. Do we want this being like a long strip coming across? I'm kinda feeling here we did the strip at the top, but what if we do the strip a little longer and encroach upon the bottom a little bit a little bit longer piece so we can kinda trim it, tests the water there and see. And I'm going to trim it a little bit kind of organically. And I want it to be no bigger than, say, the two-thirds. So let's just kinda look at this. Let's see, the paper ends here. The paper ends here. I'm just going to fold that down for a minute so I can visually correctly judged this. I could trim it if I wanted. We could go ahead and trim, but let's just take a look at this. So this is our composition. So if I wanted to come a little onto this side and more on to this side, I'm feeling like this right here is my width. And then do we not going to cut straight? I'm gonna kinda follow this little Organic II edge. Maybe. One side might look straight the other side. Which interesting point here, this side's a little straighter. This side is gonna be a little curved. So we want this side facing the kind of facing the outside, or do we want it facing the inside? Drawing our IN? Haha, more decisions. Alright, Let's just see. But I don't want it to look like I've cut it with a pair of scissors. So that is why I'm avoiding cutting down the center of this piece. I'm following what this stuff is kinda doing. I think. Cause I'm a glue this on top. I'm really concerned about getting it in the right spot. I think we should go ahead and take our cutting mat, trim this. So let's trim this and then we will put that on top. So I've got a knife over here and nice sharp exact dough knife. I'm just going to use my ruler to edge the paper and kinda helped me not cut the paper up but get a nice straight edge. And then I'm just going to trim the paper off. I apologize if the light's changing on us, it is going to be stormy today. So we went from pretty sun here in the morning to apparently some stormy come in whether looking. So I do apologize if the light is changing for us. Oh, yeah. This is like peeling the tape. What's it going to look like when we flip it over? I really like doing large abstracts this way because It's easier than committing paint before you really got everything where you wanted it. And you think, Oh no, I didn't get that in the right place. Because now, you know where we've got some decisions, we've got some things we can move around. It's like being able to change things up in Photoshop. I can change it all around before I commit to something. And I love to cut up art so fits right in with my need to cut things up. Okay, drumroll, let's get the drum roll. Where is there? It is led to my knife because I was stabbed myself. Okay. Let's take a look together. Oh, look how pretty that is. O, I'm loving this. Oh my goodness. Oh my goodness. All right, let's commit to our last piece here. And I'm going to cut it where we can trim it down some more if we need to. Because this will allow me to either go all the way down on that line of the thirds. There we go. Or it will allow me. That is it. That's right here. This is it. Oh, my goodness. Look at that. Okay. So definitely feeling the longer, not just the short because we did just the short that'd be stopping it there. I really like how that overlaps. So and I want the cut end on the inside so that you kind of draw in that way. And I love the difference of the texture versus the painted surfaces. So I feel like we got a winner here. So I'm going to just go ahead, start painting some on the back of this. Oh my goodness, this stuff is so cool. And you know, I've had this for a very long time. I just randomly sometimes go to the art store and I'll see something and I'll find it so inspiring. And I'm like I'm going to do something with that. And then it moves in my paper stash for a very long time until randomly, magically, I needed it. Not so glad that I had these yummy papers to do all this with. Alright. So let's take a look. Is that where I want it before we commit? I've got some blue here, we'll just wipe that off. Alright, that's where it's going. And the map mediums mat, so just kinda blends right in. It's not shiny. And I'm just going to get any blue glue bubbles there. Oh my goodness. Oh my goodness. Look at how amazing this one turned out and I'll turn it around so you can appreciate this. Goodness. Look at that holy cow. Look at how beautiful this is. Probably one of my new very, very favorite pieces. Look at that much better than I even in. Oh my gosh, it's so beautiful. Oh my goodness. This I think I would definitely have framed. And it may go up on the wall in this room or somewhere in my house. It's so beautiful. And I'm just gonna make sure I've got some of these edges taped down. Because holy cow, prettiest piece, prettiest piece. I love the moody dark blues. I like the texture, like the pop of the fake writing at the bottom. Oh my goodness. That's a beautiful piece. Super fun composition. I like the third, the two-thirds and 1 third and the third at the bottom. And then this is about a third wide, kinda more to the leftover, this third line. So it's our focal piece. Absolutely beautiful. Hope you enjoy that composition. And let's go on to the next project. 11. Blue & Flowers Collage: Alright, let's do another composition here. Sometimes I have a false start and I had a false start and got stuck. And when that happens, I want you to just put everything back away and start again. And so I feel like doing a composition with this yummy contrast ie piece and some blue. So I've got these blue stripes. I've got some other blue papers over here, but I'm filling this blue. And I love this paper here that's got this continual pattern on it. So I'm going to try to use that. And then what if we had a little of this corrugated kind of on our bottom third? And then what we could do after it's all done is we could paint this if we wanted or we can leave it as the cardboard. Or we could plaster on top of it for a little bit of a plaster look with this shining through. So another little idea. And I'm feeling like, you know, on those other pieces that we did, we did one with the long top on it. In this kind of layout. That first piece that we did was similar to this layout with a larger piece and the smaller piece and a little contrast and that bigger piece. What if we give this layout a try where we have a great big, pretty something. And then we cut this third over here, that's two-thirds. This is a third would cut that into two-thirds and a third. And let the bottom third b say this contrasty textural item. So I'm thinking big pattern, pop of Stripe, dark and textural to give me my kind of, I'm looking for all those different elements of pop of color, a pop of texture or a pop of pattern, maybe dark versus light. That's kinda how I'm feeling my way around these. And I'm working in the rule of thirds. I already know that I'm trying to cover a certain amount of the paper. So if we've got our paper, I know that this is 15 wide. Just put my pencil here. So I want to go up to about here for the 1 third, because the other third is about right here. And just draw myself a line. So I visually No, that's about where we're at. And then about 3.5 inches would be the third because 11 wide instead of 12. So I could either do that or I could just say let's do it at the four because it's very close to the third. They'll say, Okay, this is my size for that. And then that's about nine. So we'll say about right here is our Lower Third for that. So there is our layout. And this is where I'm gonna put something dark. Maybe this will be my pattern. So it's really nice to draw on your paper just to see maybe this will be my stripe. And then maybe this is my texture or R. So I'm kinda feeling pretty good about that. We'll see if we like it when we're done. So let's go ahead with our super yummy, yummy, yummy. This paper is semi-transparent in some spots, which is kinda cool. And I'm just going to let those edges guide where that's going to end up being. I'll give myself a little extra space here to go outside the edges. Good deal. And we can trim that at the end. And then if I don't like it, It's not committed yet. So I like this kind of designing and doing layouts like this rather than just painting straight on the paper sometimes because now we can move things around and think about it and see, did it work? Did it not work? What, what are we feeling? So let's, let's say right there, Let's just cut this. Got we can fix mistakes. Kinda like if I were in Photoshop and doing stuff, you know, I could fix things in Photoshop because you can always do a little extra editing. Alright, so I'm gonna kinda want this near the edge right there. So let's just go ahead and give us that piece right there. So it's almost like this is a real-life paper version of fix it in Photoshop because I'm kinda get it all visually laid out before, are really committed to anything. So I kinda like. This section in here maybe. Alright, so I'm going to cut some of this, will save these because apparently I like this dark with the light as a contrast element in some pieces. Look at that. Liking it. Alright, I even go that way. Look at that. They want some goodness. It's happening today. And then on this, we could actually, um, we could kinda come straight or we can kinda go as an angle. Lot of things that we could do with this. I'm gonna go ahead and commit a piece to this. Stuff is so beautiful. I'm telling you I'm going to get me an order of this with more of this because this is my favorite textural item that I own. I think. So. Now, what do we want to do here? Am I going to want this to go straight across? I do love that. We can let it do just like that. And we can paint that at the end or we can just live with it just like that. Or do we need another textural elements somewhere in there? We can even come back with a piece of something on top like that a little bit. I need a little Mode button and we need to vote up which way wanna go. I mean, I almost feel like this could start here and do the little mountain and give me a little more of a textural element encroaching on our top part there. So let's do that. Let's commit to this. Let's glue these down. I get my glue out here. Keep my brush in some water while I'm thinking and moving stuff because I don't want to think and start recording and then my brush dry out and then everything's it's hard to ruin the brush so I keep a little thing of water over here. Now if you're doing that and you're painting too at the same time because you're like, Oh, I'm gonna do multiple things at the same time. You cannot use your glue water as you're cleaning your brush, paint water. So I have a different set of water for the glue. Know that might have sounded like common sense, but you'd be surprised what you forget when you're in the midst of creating and having fun and then you're like, Oh no, I ruined a paintbrush because I didn't think. Okay, let's just go ahead and commit this. Almost want this to be a torn edge, not a straight edge. Let's just tear this before we get it. Look at that. There we go. That's what I wanted. All right. Got my little little wet life are going to get rid of any extra glue there. Haha, that's what I wanted. Say work with me, paperwork with me. I love it when I plan comes together. Alright, was just glue this down. So anyway, drawing on the paper with a semi-transparent paper like I did, I didn't think about that. One of those things that you don't think of when you're talking while you're creating. Is that if your papers semi transparent, anything you draw on this paper could show through. So be careful what you're drawing under. And if you would like mark-making underneath your yummy piece of whatever, then definitely feel free to do that. Alright, this, I'm going to let the edge encroach upon this side. I think it's interesting. And I'm going to let that do that. Get enough glue on here. Here, the pad underneath it crunch in and I'm like we're doing all right, Just making sure we got all our parts stuck down. That's pretty yummy. But what if I count was pretty the ants? Now, what if we take this as our third piece? And we let it encroach up. I've got to start at like right here. I'm going to tear let's see if we can tear this. Look at bat. I'm in love with that edge. Oh my goodness. Look at that. Oh yeah, I'm feeling that right there. Look how pretty that is. Okay. Are we too far up? Let's see. I could come right here. Oh yeah, let's do that. Alright. Let's, let's put some glue on the paper. Try not to glue my paper down to my pad under here. I do like having a slightly raised off my table though. That's why I've got that pad under it. It seems to be easier to work with it slightly raised. In my mind. I'm also going to put a little glue. I know this is going to need it up here, so let's just go ahead and get that glue up there. Alright, let's commit. We've committed to that. Let's go ahead. I might need some more glue, but we'll put that right there for a moment. Let's go ahead and see. Do we need anything else or are we good with our papers? My whole goal on some of these is do not come back and add tons of Marx and paint and all that stuff. I kinda want these papers and all to be wailing on. The paper feels funny cutting it because of some kind of weird didn't feel the same as this other paper. Some kinda weird plasticky feel. I didn't feel like I was even cutting it. If you're wondering what kind of ruler this is? A quilting ruler that I found. The craft store over there with the fabric stuff so you can find it anywhere that sells quilting supplies or Michaels or Hobby Lobby or sewing supplies for quilting. And I particularly love it because I can see through it. It's got great big markings across it so I can easily see how big something I want to make something. It is my favorite ruler for cutting things like we're cutting. Love this ruler. And it's an omni grid, o m, n, IG RID, omni grid. It's my favorite art ruler because it lets me do stuff like this and easily see without having to pencil mark stuff and all kinds of things like that. There we go. One go. Oh, okay. Reveal time. Alright, let's just flip it real fast. Look at that. That's pretty cool. You see it in the way I'm seeing it. Hahaha, super fun, super fun. Now that we have got that kind of like that, we can decide if we want to add some color to this part here. We could add like some plaster or some molding paste to give it more textural and more color as an element. Or we may just like the textural piece that it is. The reason why I'm saying we could do that because like this piece that we painted, I do like that extra element of some paint. So I'm not painting kind of stuff. So we could decide, do we want anything there or do we need another piece as a pop of something like maybe not this piece, but look at that. Like if we did a pop of something, I'm almost feeling like it just needs one more something. I don't think it needs the same as what I have, but I do feel like it needs something. So let me go and get let me think. I'm going to think about this and I'll be back. Sit with this for a moment. Alright, so I was looking down at my papers for a moment just thinking and looking at this yummy piece, got this yummy piece. This one I think has a tag on it. This one's from somewhere different than the other. Oh, no, this one's from the GPC papers.com to so this is another kind of paper. What if look at this right here in the center, another textural element. But look how cool that contrast these other things that we have going on in here. So what if we did a piece of this almost like right down here maybe, or even across the dark. Just as, I don't know, something extra fun here. We could have it up top coming across. Really kinda want to offset it a little bit. I really like this edge. A lot. Could offset it this way. Really kinda feeling it across, I think with this edge, maybe a little crinkle. And then we can see our cardboard underneath it. I'm filling that with a crinkle. What about that? Let's try that. Likely going across if I'm going to put it about right there, the crinkle, and I'm just going to tack it on there doesn't have to be glued. A 100%. Maybe I don't want to cut this about right here. All right, Be brave. And I don t think I can tear this because it's thread, but I'm going to wrinkle it up a little bit. So maybe the cut edge won't be as weird. Let's see. So what I've got, I've either got some I've got a glue stick. I don't want to put so much glue on the bottom of this that you see all the glue. I kinda just want some glue to attack it in. Kinda just liking it like that though. So what if I just take and put some glue on the back and just see if we can start getting this tack down where we're thinking. Because the goal here again, it's not too. Here we go, not to glue the whole thing. I just want to tack it down. And because these are some threaded pieces, that glue is going to definitely, there we go. See I just want to tack it down. I don't want to see that it's glue under there. And then I can trim it. Nice. So let's just check all four corners down real good. And it can kinda be an element that's a little more floaty. Look at that. Then we could do if you just flip it over and with our knife. Hopefully, trim this to the paper size. I'm trying to be real careful. I don't want to pull it on the other side at all. All right. Let's see what we did. Yeah. That is a beautiful sometimes you just need to sit and live with something for a moment and then see what other element did it need? So we started off with this composition here and then overlaid something just a little on top of it. And I liked that, that we did, that. I love, love, love this gorgeous composition and the elements that we have in there. So I love that there's some pattern where there's some stripe, there's some little pop of something dark contrasting it. I love all the textural pattern on this piece of cardboard. And then the pattern that we have on the piece on top of that. This is super pretty. Alright, so I hope you enjoyed this composition and I'll see you back in class. 12. Going Really Large Collage: Alright, in this one, let's go gigantic. This is an 18 inch by 24 inch piece of watercolor paper. It's watercolor pad. Now what I really love about paper this BIG is even if you actually don't plan to use the pages in the size paper, what's really cool is you could cut big papers into small papers. And if you're wanting to budget out your paper usage, just to give you an idea. This was 3899, so thirty-nine dollars, it's 18 by 24. You can very easily get nine by 12 out of this four pieces out of every sheet. There's 30 sheets in here. And that's like four times 3020 pieces of paper. So the reason I'm mentioning that is because for a nine by 12 pad, I might pay 25 or $30 just for it, maybe $20. And it's only got 30 sheets. And so 204060, $80 worth of paper. I could've got this great big one for thirty-nine dollars and cut my paper up. If you're interested in budgeting paper, that is a really great way to do that. You get big sheets and cut them down to smaller sizes. Now I happened to have this one big pad, and I love it, but I don't normally work this big in this class. I can't tell you how excited I am to be jumping on a piece of paper this huge, and I have a cradled board that's this size that I had just saved forever, waiting on some masterpiece to be painted or mounted to it. And if this is a masterpiece, I'm going to mount this to that board, paint the sides black, and hang this in my house. Because it is yummy. And I saved this piece of black corrugated cardboard for this piece. I wanted it to magically work on this piece. And I've got this yummy blue piece that I painted with paint and ink. And I gotta tell you painting wise. I really loved using the inks on these papers for painting. They gave the best results and the best colors and it really was my favorite painting stuff. And then I'm wanting to use one of these translucent handmade papers. This is again from that yummy Paper Source, GPC, papers.com. And when you shop by part number, this is somewhere in the pages of the seventies because there's like 85 pages. And these, I found a lot of these kind of near the end. So flip through all those pages. Now I'm kinda thinking composition wise. I'm just pulling this stuff over the composition wise. I was kind of thinking that maybe we could do this on the bottom third, kinda like here. We can have this blue as the big part. We can have this white as this little part. And then if I get it all done and I think needs a little extra on maybe this over here. If we get it all done and you think, oh, it's missing something. What if I take my little handmade grass piece and do an element here? Because it's already in the series that we have been creating on here with the different papers that we made. So if you repeat some elements, that's perfectly fine. So if we're looking at this big piece of paper, then I've hit my ruler from myself. Here we go. So we said this is 24 inches. So, so right here that's 1 third. Got another eight, That's another third. So there's our thirds. So I'm kind of wanting our corrugated piece to be on this third right here. Then I'm thinking, see, we've got 18 inches. Go in this way. So it's gonna be about 666. So flip it around where I can see my sixes. Here we go. So this is about 1 third, I'm feeling like the white on this side, the blue on that side. So here's my third ish. Take about right there, it's going to be my white little squares. This will be my all over just yummy pattern. And then if we need an extra element, I've got a line right here. Well, we can get that extra element in there. So let's commit. Now. We got to decide. We liked this brown paper edge coming over the white and then, or do we want that to be the painted edge? So I feel like if I do the painted edge, I'm definitely going to have to do the grass. If I do the brown edge. It's questionable. Maybe I don't have to do the grass. I could go ahead and tear this edge and make it looked like an unfinished and then we can judge it. So they won torn edge. I don't like straight edges. And my composition because I feel like it's two matching, matching straight east ready? Or however you want to say that trying to keep my papers with the labels on it. So anytime somebody It's like what is that paper? I can see the edge of it. All right, so let's see. If I want to take up 1 third right here. Then I'm going to want to come down and just cut this. And we can go a little wider, trim it up like we're always doing. But let's think 1 third. Let's go, let's go right down this one. So it's a tiny bit larger. Doesn't have to be exact on the bottom because I'm going to be putting the cardboard piece on top of this. Alright, some filling that. Look at that. That is such a pretty piece since white. So it's really not doing a whole lot there. I can see my pencil mark under here, so let's get rid of that. Again. Be careful if you're drawing on stuff. If you're using some of these translucent papers, do it in pencil if you're gonna do it. So you can be like, oops, I need to erase that. There we go. I don't want to see that pencil mark under there. And then I'm feeling okay, So let's just tear the bottom of this. That wasn't straight, but that's okay. It's gonna be underneath this over here. So really didn't have to do that, but I wanted to. Alright, so we're going to come like right about there. This will get trimmed off. This right about here. Oh yeah, I'm feeling that, but I'm definitely feeling like overall, we're definitely going to be using a piece of this grassy stuff. So then do I want to go the whole way, or just a little element right up here. Let's trim this where it's already getting trimmed. And see. Again, I'm not wanting this to be straight, so I'm kinda following this edge of whatever this is that they've got glued in here. I want it to look a little more natural than a straight edge. Yeah, I like that. Put this over to the side. Then I want to go ahead and trim this up a little more natural. It's got a straight edge and there it doesn't look like it belongs. Alright, so then that could go right up there maybe. Or we could come back and go all the way. I feel like it's gonna be hard on top of that ridged piece. So I'm almost feeling like we're gonna be right up here with this one. Which alike because looking at our composition things, we were kinda doing this but came way down on the other piece like and on this one, we're really sticking truer to our composition idea. So let's just commit to that. Commit were committing. All right, let's start some glue in. Blue, baby, blue, blue, blue. I need I need something to well, we'll just we'll just go with it. My brush was kinda wet but we're just gonna go with it. It'll still stick the glue if it's a little more water in there. And I'm not glue in the whole paper at the same time because this glue dries faster than I move. Apparently. I'm gonna go ahead and get it wet wipe out just in case I'm getting blue everywhere because I don't want to randomly glue something I didn't intend. Let's see, who's already starting to dry a little bit. You got to move fast. Alright, so let's go ahead. I'm gonna make sure I got up is up because there is a definite right and wrong side to this. This paper is so beautiful. Holy cow. Super beautiful. I love that. It's white. It's a textural element. Go ahead. It's different than any of the other elements. We can pour some wooh, got some sticky glue in there. All right, let's just keep that going. I just want to make sure I've got glue on the top side of this form before us taking the air on this. Then I'm going to trim it before decide on the final elements. So and then if you're doing this and you're thinking, Oh, I've got some wrinkling of some paper up under here. It doesn't matter. Look at all that texture and pattern. A little bit of paper. Texture wrinkle in there, like you could have watered up this paper to and got some good wrinkle texture that way too. But if you get it and you don't like it or you're thinking, Oh, I did something wrong. No, no, no, you did not. This is craft paper. It's real thin and it is very likely to wrinkle up like that for you. But that's part of why I like this paper. It's why I picked this paper for that extra textual element that we get with this type of collage. So I don't mind it if that bothers you, you might consider using thicker papers as your collage papers so that they don't do that. All right, let me grab my cutting mat and we'll move this great big pad of paper out of our way. And let's flip this over to trim this paper. I don't have enough glue. Down here. It started to dry. Now I've got another glue. This is just a craft bond kind of glue. And it's just going to give me a beat at glue. I could use more matte medium or something else, but see if this stick it down because this is real thick, heavy stuff. Alright, I'll work that some more. But for the rest of this, I want to go ahead and do some trimming. I think that is water. Ruler. Got our exact dough knife. And then I'm going to trim some of this paper off. Alright, here's our grand reveal. How pretty this is. Oh my goodness. Now I will tell you what I've discovered on doing these larger pieces and even those other size ones we were just doing. These tend to dry mike later they keep on drying and then they're not flat. And if you set something heavy on top of these, like just a board for the evening, you'll let that dry flat rather than wrinkled. That's just the nature of the glue. So I'm going to let this sit overnight under something heavy, maybe a couple of art boards and that will keep that flat for me. And if I mount it to a cradle board, that would keep that flat for me also. Okay. So let's see. I feel like it's got to have this final piece. Look that definitely feeling like that is what it's going to complete this. Let's do it, okay, Instead of using the mod podge, I think I'm gonna go ahead with my craft glue. Craft bond is just kind of a glue that will let me go along these edges here. I do like using acid free glues. They're more archival. So a nicer glue. If it's a nicer piece of art. If it's something where you're going to kinda collage and paint on top of it. Then you'll want to use the map mediums instead of the mod podge. Mod podge is more of a craft glue, but because it's underneath all of these papers and it's only gluing them down and they're very thick. I'm not worried about the glue turning yellow or anything like that, which it shouldn't. But I'm not worried about that because of the way I'm using this under thick papers. Just a stick stuff down really good for me. Okay. Let's go for it. Thinking I want to get it kinda centered between the two. Kinda even there. So beautiful, oh my goodness, oh my goodness. This piece is gorgeous. Make sure it's stuck really good. What do you think? I'm really feeling? This gigantic, large collage? And the reason I think it's fun to go bigger. Besides the fact that, especially if you'd like to sell things people like bigger is you figure out different challenges because doing a little bitty pieces are way easier than doing a great, big, gigantic piece. And if you will, do a little bit of planning ahead of time, kinda like we did with our pre-plan of our compositions. It makes it so much easier and let us go bigger, way easier than we would have. So I hope you enjoy going large and I'll see you back in class. 13. Final Thoughts: How much fun did you have in class today? I got to tell you this one has been one of the most fun things to do. Painting my own collage papers, putting together in a way that's a little less kitschy than I usually do collage. I usually do cute little pieces. This time I wanted to do a little bit larger maybe Urbanists, kind of contemporary pieces that are going to turn into actual beautiful pieces of art to hang maybe in my house or my studio. I'm really contemplating changing up the wall above my table and having some more of these more contemporary urban art pieces hanging up there for awhile. So I hope you enjoyed learning the different techniques and seeing the different ways to do composition. The different colors maybe that you've put together, the different collage elements that you created. I'm really excited to see what it is that you've created in class. So definitely come back and share those projects with me. If you enjoyed the class, please leave me some good feedback and I can't wait to see what you're making, so I'll see you next time.