Choosing Papers & Palette for Collage

Series Summary

The word collage was created by Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso to refer to their series of paintings in the early 20th century. Their paintings incorporated everyday elements such as matchbooks and newspapers onto the surface of their art. For decades, collages have been a favorite project of elementary school students who create self portraits from their favorite magazine photos, candy wrappers and stamps. With the rise of scrapbooking as a popular pastime, the art of collaging has reached a whole new level of artistic achievement for people who had never previously considered themselves artists. In this free video series on visual arts, a professional artist offers valuable information about choosing collage papers and palettes. Get tips on gathering resource materials. Find out about patterned, hand-painted, colored and hand-printed papers. Learn how to choose dried leaves, thin material, magazines, patterns, same colors, like hues and scraps. Discover how to select a first color for a collage palette.

Video Transcript

"So in this series I'm going to be talking to you about choosing your Collaging Papers and your Palette. And basically what this means is establishing the type of colors that you're going for, values that you're going for. Again, in this piece I've chosen to use a sort of blue and, "if you can see with these in the way", blue and gray scale sort of palette. And some other pieces, I may have chosen to do more reddish colored palettes. Inside of this piece, I have chosen to use a sort of greenish palettes. So you got the idea, I'm sort of working towards choosing my palette out of the different colors and materials that I have. And then, sort of setting aside piles of these different colors of palette choices so that when you're working, you have the option to work from one palette or another and that they're sort of organized in a way that is easier for you to find and easier for you to work with which is again why I have asked you to have some Ziploc bags or plastic bags to keep things separated."