Collages sent: Vickie and Jill

I have been trying to make a collage or two a day to send to my classmates in the collage course I was taking. I've been making them in batches, but my technique has been pretty fiddly and slow. I took photos of the first batch, but my camera and the lighting were pretty terrible so I won't clutter up the blog with them. Here are two of the six final collages.

In these two collages, I made a base layer of text (using a page from an old typewriter manual) and then did different patterns with a layer of gesso. When that was dry, I added paper and "ephemera" in black, white, red and yellow. These were my two favourites. They were whisked around the world - to Belgium, France, the US, and Canada.

Yesterday, I picked up Randel Plowman's (of A Collage A Day) The Collage Workbook, which has lots of great ideas. I made these two collages quickly, using his Layering 101 tips. I just found some papers I liked, trying to keep them in a similar palette, added a second layer with some tissue or other translucent papers, and then added a subject. It was interesting how there was serendipity in the end. In the first, for instance, the squares and rectangles were echoed pretty much by chance as was the positioning of MONOPOLY on the man's chin. After some fiddly days of collage making (between a lot of other things), these two were fun and relaxing. Perfect for the holidays. More to come. These are off to Vickie in Decatur, Georgia and Jill in Clare, South Australia.