How To Choose Your Collage Materials

Hi, my name is Nick Malone. I'm an artist based in London and I run classes for beginners here at the studio. You can always find on our website, londonartclasses dot com, and there's also a link to londonartclasses on the internet page where you are at the moment.

We're going to have a look at selecting materials for your collage. Well, the first thing of course, is what you're going to base the materials on, by which I mean, what you're going to attach them to and you want to make sure that if you're using different materials in collage but whatever you're sticking them onto is going to be strong enough to support their weight, so you're going to at least have a pretty heavy piece of card, something like this. Now, what about the materials that you're going to use in your collage? Well, there's lots of possible sources, in a way, there are as many different kinds of material for a collage as there are two dimensional objects in the world, you know, what does it matter what you use.

So, what you're really thinking about is what your collage is concerned with and what would be particularly useful material, because one of the big things about collage, because you can move things around, is that you can hit on, you can hit on ideas that you never even thought of, just as you're walking around. So, what you really want to do is to start thinking about your collage, and have an eye open. Be ready.

Be aware, to spot those leaves, that piece of photography, that swatch of cloth, that you would like to put into the collage, that's relevant to the sort of collage that you're going to make. So, obviously I mentioned, you're going to have photographs, now these would be cut out of magazines that you see, or they can be photographs that you yourself have taken of course, and it's always a very good idea, if you're building up a collage, to have a little digital camera. It could just be the camera on your mobile phone to photograph those things that are going to go into the collage later.

But don't forget, that you can use lots of different materials as well. It might be the feather, it might be a sponge, might be the back of a piece of canvas or material. And you can also create your own material as well, by a technique known as frottage, where you take a particular surface, and then you have a piece of comparatively thin paper and by rubbing over it.

In this case, the markings on the back of this case there create a pattern, which you might then cut out with your scalpel or whatever, and use within your collage. So, all of these things, photos, materials, the frottage, the bits of stuff from the garden, they all come together and you can organize them in a way you find particularly exciting. But the big thing is, is that your materials have been chosen and they were chosen because you were thinking about what you want to do.

And also, one final point, remember that quite often, fewer materials than you imagine can create a very powerful effect. So, you may find that just on it, just maybe three or four or five pieces of material are all you need for your collage or of course you may well want a lot more than that. But whatever you do, you want to make sure that they adhere to the support properly and the best thing to use is some kind of acrylic medium which you can get from any art shop, which you can either pull like that and it comes in a very fluid form.

Or you can also get acrylic gel which you can then take out with a knife, spread along the back of the objects you're going to include and then stick them down. .