How To Make A History Collage

Hi, my name's Nick Malone and I'm an artist based in London. I run classes for beginners at the studio and you can always find us at our website www londonartclasses dot com and there's a link to londonartclasses dot com from the internet page that you're on the moment. We're going to have a look at how to create a history collage.

So, what do we do when you're doing a history collage is to think of different ways to make sure you're going to pull the collage together. One possibility for instance is having a large photo of an incident in the period of history that you're concentrating on your collage. This is from the Spanish Civil War and you might decide to have that picture stuck on to your base and then you may decide, okay, well, there are perfect images from the Civil War that I want to cut up and I want to make that part of the overall collage.

So, cut this up like this and maybe you want to start to put them on or cut out elements and maybe if you want to just give it a little bit more definition, you could also find something almost torn-out of a page and have it stuck on like this. And you cut them to the appropriate size and then you stick them down with an acrylic medium such as a gel like this or a more liquid form of acrylic medium like this. Acrylic is always good to stick the materials down with because it doesn't debase.

An alternative way of which you might do your history collage is, for example, to take a map of a particular area and you're going to deal with things that happen to go on in that area. It could have been a military campaign or here, maybe you want to look at lost species that once existed in that area of the world. So again, you cut out your map and then you have your images of lost species here and you start to cut them out of the magazine and stick them in the different places on the map that these creatures once existed.

Of course, there are lots of variations you can do on that but always, what you're trying to do is locate the small photographs in the midst of your collage within an overall image that pulls them together such as that large photograph, I think it was from the Civil War or as I say, a map, or something that underpins the events in which these little images from history are combined on your card. .