How To Make A Collage

Hi, my name's Nick Malone and I'm an artist based in London. We have classes for beginners here at the studio and you can always find us on our website www londonartclasses dot com and there's a link to this website on the internet page as well. Today, we're going to look at how to make a collage.

A collage is when you get together different pieces of material and attach them to a card or something sufficiently strong to support them and make a picture that way. The idea was first developed by Picasso beginning the last century but today, it's a very useful way of making all sorts of ideas come together. So, let's just have a look what we're going to need to get started.

First of all, we need something that's strong enough to support other materials to be attached to it. So for example, I got a piece of cardboard here or a piece of board. It doesn't need to be too heavy because it's only supporting paper but you don't want it flopping around.

Also, we're going to have to have a material with which we can attach the bits of paper or the other stuff that we're going to use to the support. So for instance, I think a good thing is to have acrylic gloss medium because acrylic is great to hold pieces together and if you want to paint with acrylics on top, then there's no problem with that. And with acrylic gloss medium, you can get it, I'd like in a gel such as this or you can get it in more liquid form like this.

It's a form of glue but it's also used in painting a lot so you can combine your painting with your gluing and the different pieces of photography and paper that go in the card. You're also going to need things to cut up the pieces of paper or other material that you're going to use in your collage. So, it's a good idea to prepare yourself with some scissors, a scalpel's a good idea or maybe a Stanley knife, and also something if you want to spread out the collage, like a palette knife like this or something a little bit wider.

Okay, so the next thing you're going to need and are the materials that you're going to include in your collage, now these might well be photographs that you're picking up from a magazine or that you've taken yourself. They could be bits of painting that you yourself have done some previous time and they could also be different pieces of material, a piece of, for example, painting paper or colored papers like this and so forth. So, what you then want to do is to start to cut out the parts of the collage that you're going to use.

Maybe you decide, okay, well, I'm going to use that part of this image here and then you just cut that out and you put it on the base such as the white base here. You put it on there like that and then maybe you decide that you want to use maybe part of this figure here like this and you can put that there. And then, maybe you want to just have some areas of plain colour so maybe you have a bit of colored paper that you could cut up into the shape that you want and you have that ready as well there, and maybe on top of that, you've got, I don't know, you put up this pattern here and you cut out part of that and so forth.

You take the point that you can use anything in collage. You can tear, you can add, you can cut out, it doesn't really matter because the idea of it is just to liberate your imagination, that you don't get too caught up with traditional stuffy ways of doing things, you can just move ideas around quite quickly and you can put in all these images that you picked up in magazines, the photos that you took or bits of material that you just kind of like, bits of colour or whatever, and you can put them all together in something that you find appealing. The next good thing about it is that you can learn to start arranging them in the way that you like and that might have particular significance for you.

Maybe there's a little bit of painting that you've done a while ago and you want to use that as well so you cut that out - as long a