Collage Techniques (plus 3 Artists Using Collage In Surprising Methods) ⋆ News: Art, Travel, Design, Technology

“Collage is the cut, the tear, the rupture and the overlay of our contemporary culture. It is the hybrid language of urbanity — remixed, re-contextualized, and wholly built from the fragments of daily life.” – Pavel Zoubok

Collage has at all times been a favoured pastime of scrapbookers, however its artwork historic beginnings may be traced again to the early Twentieth century, when artists comparable to George Braque and Pablo Picasso utilised cut-and-paste techniques to create new, layered imageries. The arrival of collage was a break with the previous which got here to encourage a torrent of artwork actions. Cubists, futurists, Dadaists and surrealists alike all embraced the method, setting the scene for conceptual artists like Marcel Duchamp, by questioning if excessive artwork may encompass discovered objects and present supplies.

Taking its title from the French phrase ‘coller’ (‘to glue’ or ‘to stick together’) collage usually refers to two-dimensional works created via an assemblage of various supplies. For many early pioneers of the medium, it was a method to look at the shifting societal and technological adjustments caused by modernism and urbanisation. Take Kurt Schwitters, for instance, who made artwork from the particles of on a regular basis life: newspapers, stamps, tickets, product packaging, and so forth, to replicate the quickly altering world. Today, the medium has been embraced by a brand new roster of artists and remodeled via the usage of digital applied sciences. In this text, we take a look at three up to date artists using collage in distinct, revolutionary methods and provide some enjoyable techniques impressed by their work to attempt for your self.

Laslo Antal

In 2017, Laslo Antal started documenting the occasions of his day by day life via collage, producing small, assemblage narratives every day. His small-scale collages, posted to his Instagram account, cowl an unlimited vary of themes and experiences, from profound and emotional, to banal and weird. Through these ‘visual diaries’, Antal examines the unreliability of reminiscence. ‘If I don’t document my quick experiences day by day,’ he observes, ‘I’m afraid I would by no means be capable of entry these elements of myself once more.’

For Antal, it appears, collage is a medium that permits not just for reconstruction and fragmentation, but additionally, paradoxically, for a sort of preservation. Rejecting the available mass of printed materials, he works solely from his personal drawings and prints, proving that, in a digital age, returning to the haptic pleasures of slicing, ripping and pasting could be a fulfilling and affirming course of.

Technique #1: Auto-collage

For per week, attempt recording your experiences via collage. Choose a constant dimension to work inside, and use solely your personal work as materials. This could possibly be photocopies of outdated sketches, bits of unfinished work, or intentional work made with collage in thoughts.

‘Wherever I go, I bring with me my 28 cm x 35 cm workbook and my materials, so that I can end every day with the practice of making my daily collage,’ notes Antal. Experiment with accumulating your experiences in a pocket book throughout the day to make use of that materials later. Draw from a variety of experiences — this may be as trivial as a humorous comment made by a co-worker on a tea break, or as ruminative as your inner-most ideas. With this materials, attempt to piece collectively a story in uncommon methods, using symbols and pictures as representations of sensations or dialogue.

Ria Patricia Röder

Between 1962 and 1964, Robert Rauschenberg, the enfant horrible of post-war American artwork, made a collection of collage works that mixed silkscreened photographic photos from mass media with painted gestures. This method functioned as a rudimentary ‘scanning’ course of, which he later picked up in works of the 2000s, with the wide-spread arrival of laptop applied sciences. Following in his footsteps, Berlin-based artist Ria Patricia Röder’s collage works combine analogue and digital applied sciences to create distinctive pictorial poems made with scanners. Referring to those works as ‘scanograms’, Röder makes use of her scanner to play with dimensionality, scanning each 2D and 3D objects facet by facet to supply a disorientating, unreal impact.

Technique #2: Scanograms

Collect objects and cuttings over per week to make use of on your personal scanograms. These may be something from lemons to newspaper ads, however be sure you have a mixture of 2D and 3D materials. Select issues which have attention-grabbing dimensions, spherical objects for instance, or flat photos with numerous shadows. This will improve the scanning results of focus and blur which add to the dream-like textures of the scanned picture. Additionally, you may attempt choosing your objects in an associative means, and like Röder, create ‘pictorial poems’ together with your scanograms.

Lola Dupré

At first look, it’s simple to imagine Lola Dupré’s collages are digital manipulations of photographic photos, however upon nearer inspection, the delicate ridges of paper reveal layers and layers of rigorously hand positioned cut-outs. Based close to Glasgow, Scotland, Dupré’s work is visually intriguing and painstakingly detailed. Using tiny items of duplicated photos, she re-composes her topics to look elongated and alien, usually with a number of further limbs or animalesque options. Sourcing photos from magazines, photobooks in addition to her personal images, her collage works are made with easy supplies: scissors, paper, PVA glue. Through the usage of conventional instruments and nontraditional strategies, Dupré combines a Twentieth-century Dada sensibility with a distinctly Twenty first-century aesthetic of digital manipulation.

Technique #3: Tactile manipulation

In the way of Dupré, start by sourcing portraits of topics that visually curiosity you; these may be vogue fashions, political figures, folks you recognize and even pets. Make round ten copies of the identical picture using a photocopier. With scissors and PVA glue, minimize up your copied photos and reconstruct them on a separate sheet of paper. Plan the look of your collage in advance, or let your instinct lead you to surprising outcomes. Think about how one can distort the unique picture in your copy — maybe you’ll give your topic 5 pairs of eyes, or possibly you’ll widen the face and elongate the neck to create a DIY ‘filter’.