How to Make Collage Posters

Whether you're advertising the school fair, decorating your den or just giving your children a new art experience, making collage posters is a great way to make something new and remarkable out of simple materials. Collage has in common with jigsaw puzzles putting small pieces together to produce an exciting whole. But when making a collage, you get the fun of creating the pieces and perhaps surprising even yourself with the results! Follow the steps below to produce a small collage poster using a number of techniques---but remember that this is only the beginning. You may finish this beginner project and think you can do better. Well, yes, you can! Only your imagination limits what you can create in collage!

Things You'll Need

• 1 piece 9 x 12 poster board Bottle of school glue Scissors Newspaper or other work-surface protection For practice project: 1 piece 6x9 blue nylon net (sky); 1 piece 6x9 blue fabric (ocean); 3 sheets sandpaper or 1 piece 6x9 tan fabric (beach); 1 small sheet brown felt; 1 yard green velvet ribbon (wide or narrow); 3-12 brown buttons; 1 or more round, red 1-inch stickers. For future projects: Scraps of some/any/all of these: colored tissue paper, construction paper, colored cellophane, sewing fabric, felt, wallpaper, lace, crepe paper, fringe or other sewing trimmings, paper doilies, colored plastic tape, stickers, yarn, magazine pictures Plastic or other scrap-container, to hold your leftovers and collect other materials for the future

Instructions

Learning to Collage and Making a Practice Piece

1. Lay your poster board and scrap materials out on your work surface, so you can see everything. Lay out some sample combinations on your poster board to decide how colors and textures go together. A collage can be very representational---that is, a collage about a tropical paradise can have a beach and palm trees and coconuts you can clearly identify. To make that, you could cut out blue paper for the ocean, tan fabric for the beach, brown felt for the tree trunks and green velvet ribbon for the palm leaves, and add brown buttons for the coconuts. Cut and paste, and you're done! Most often, however, collages tend to be more abstract and suggestive. Experiment with scraps in less realistic shapes. A beach can still be horizontal and tree trunks still vertical, but see how you can arrange the colors and pieces to suggest the tropics, while letting the people who look at your work add their own memories to your visual suggestions. (Those buttons are still a pretty good idea, by the way.)

2. Cut out the materials you have decided to use and move them around on the poster board until you like the look. Bear in mind the other characteristic that generally separates collage from painting or drawing: the feel. While you are unlikely to want friends putting their hands all over your creation, they should want to! Glue only the ends of the palm fronds to their trunks, so they wave in the breeze. The tan beach fabric can be plain homespun, velveteen---or sheets of sandpaper! A red beach ball can be a shiny sticker or a bottle cap. An interesting collage is interesting in texture as well as sight.

3. Apply a thin coat of glue to the poster board and attach the first layer of materials. Ocean, beach and sky go on first. Trees are next---some palm fronds glued flat, and some anchored only on one end, to suggest the breeze. Gluing on the buttons might spark memories of a long-neglected vacation shell collection. Find it and scatter some of the littlest shells across the beach. Cut some of your shiny red stickers in little strips, and there's now a beach chair sitting next to your beach ball! Or not. One of the great things about making a collage is that you are completely in charge of what you want to portray. The only absolute directions for collage are: choose, cut, arrange (which includes re-arrange) and glue. And now you've followed them all. You know how to collage.

Using Collage Posters

1. Make a collage poster as customized wall art to suit a decorating scheme. Substitute foam board for poster board and find a frame with no glass to turn your poster into hangable art. This may be the final destination for your tropical piece---if not, you now know how to get started on a project that will fit into your decor. Because of the textures in your collage, it will be hard to protect with glass. Check art-supply stores for finishing sprays that will keep your collage from collecting dust. Apply one or more coats according to directions. Hang and admire. It's a real original!

2. Use collage posters to decorate quickly for a holiday party. Take a shortcut by combining your own materials with pre-made holiday decorations to turn your family room into a St. Patrick's Day pub or a New Year's Eve disco. Collage posters are just the thing when you want big, temporary, themed decorations for a special event. If it's a family party, let your children join in the fun. Cut-and-paste is right up their alley.

3. Use collage techniques to attract attention to informational posters. You may want to keep collaging to a frame around the information or do a flatter collage to let lettering stand out. Or you can go wild. A school book fair poster is a lot more interesting if it's decorated with little books that really open. It's hard to forget a fundraiser when its posters shimmer, shine and even flutter. Here it's okay to touch, and people who do will definitely remember your event.

Tips & Warnings

• Once you get started, keep a bin or basket for possible collage materials. A little of this and a bit of that keep your creative mind working and save both money and supply-shopping time. Something silvery and crunchy-looking and about this long---got it!