Rising Sun Indiana Collage Workshop

Join me for New Creative Collage Techniques – April 21 & 22 at Rising Sun Art Workshops.
Learn lots of collage techniques and see how easy it is to make exciting art work with a wide assortment of odds and ends and, if you like, paint. You’ll have fun making creative magazine and newspaper collages, recycling old paintings, and creating faux-texture background supports for collage papers, including oriental papers, handmade papers and photographs, using techniques described in my new book, New Creative Collage Techniques. I'll show you how to set up your workspace and prepare your materials so your collages will last. There will be a brief demo at the start of each class, then everyone will work on suggested activities or on their own projects. You’ll also learn design tips and how to make color work in your collages. To add to the excitement bring some items to share with the class–one artist’s “trash” might be another’s treasure! Each day ends with an upbeat group critique. For all levels of experience. Hope to see you there. Contact Vera Curnow.

Collage Lamination

Someone in my watercolor class requested a lesson on applying rice or mulberry paper to watercolor paper to create a textured surface to paint on, so that's what we did yesterday. Students brought in unryu or other lightweight Asian papers, some with fibers running through them and others plain. We discussed terminology first: is it rice paper or mulberry? Rice paper has become a generic term describing papers that may be made of rice straw, mulberry, bamboo or hemp. Here is a helpful article in Wikipedia with more information on rice papers.

I crumpled a piece of rice paper into a ball, then flattened it out. To adhere the rice paper, I brushed fluid acrylic matte medium liberally onto a piece of 140# cold press watercolor paper. Then I placed the rice paper on the surface, allowing some of the wrinkles to remain. I patted it down with a damp sponge so the rice paper would make contact and bond with the watercolor paper. I usually use a soft brayer for this, but didn't have it with me yesterday. That's all there is to it. Wait until it is dry so you don't get acrylic medium in the hair of your good watercolor brushes. It's fun to see what watercolor paint does on this surface, crawling into the ridges in some places, making dark crinkly lines and almost disappearing in other areas.

You can also lay thinner rice paper on the support and brush the medium directly onto it. The medium will soak through and adhere the paper to the support. In a technique called "overlay" you can adhere rice paper to a watercolor painting to create a misty effect or to tone down aggressive colors in a background. For these techniques it's best not to use sumi-e papers, which have a smooth surface on the back that might prevent the medium from soaking through the paper.

These techniques are all shown in Creative Collage Techniques: A Step-by-Step Guide.

Book Review: Hand Decorating Paper

Searching for information on making paste paper, I found Hand Decorating Paper by Marie Browning (2002). It includes many hand-decorated papers with easy instructions and projects. Here are some of the papers you can make: antiqued, batik, batik with paint resist, block-printed, bubble, color transfer with tissue, faux leather, laminated, marbelized (three ways), nature prints, paste, rubber-stamped, splattered, sponged, spray-painted, stenciled, tie-dye and watercolor textures. Wow! This is a treasure for collage artists, but also for watercolor painters who would like to try something different for a background or texture in their paintings. Most supplies are relatively simple, but techniques may take different paper or tools. You'll be inspired to make up your own variations once you get started. These activities are great blockbusters. When you're finished playing, you have a stack of papers to use in art and craft projects.