I use a lot of collage in my work, primarily in mixed media pieces, visual journal pages, and in my SoulCollage® cards.
Before you start collecting, let me give you fair warning… it’s addictive. Once you develop an eye for spotting great collage imagery, you’ll be knee deep in pictures, patterned papers, and other things that you might have thrown away or sent to recycling in the past.
When it comes to magazines, Nat Geo is my favorite. Each issue has a zillion images on a wide variety of topics, and is great for making SoulCollage® cards AND for visual journaling. (*Note: Be aware of copyright issues when using other artists’ images. Both of the modalities I mentioned are for personal use. If you are selling your work, however, you’ll want to steer away from copyrighted images.)
I also like to flip through home decorating, fashion, food, and a other colorful magazines looking for color, patterns, and texture. You can create an entire color palette from nothing but torn out images. Notice the abundance of decorative papers I used on the journal page above. The figure on the right wears clothing made from a magazine garden scene. After cutting and gluing it, I added a touch of colored pencil to the brighten the background. I also used recycled wrapping paper, Japanese handmade paper, and other papers that I painted, stamped, tore into small pieces before gluing. Maps, pages from old tattered books, shelf paper, pages from phone books, paper doilies, decorative napkins and other assorted treasures also make their way into my work. At some point you’ll want to organize your images so that you can quickly put your hands on what you want in any given moment. I have my own system that I’ll share with you in a later post.
Have fun on your treasure hunt!
About Beth Marcil