Finishing a Collage Piece

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, which 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 finishing a collage. Get tips on protecting borders, releasing adhesive edges, scoring edges, removing tape and drawing with glue sticks. Find out how to cut edges, blend and do spot collaging. Learn about types of collage and adhesives.

Video Transcript

"So we've been working on a couple of different things in the field of collage, and we were specifically working with magazine and colored paper and creating a collaged piece. And now I'm going to show you in this series just how a piece is finished based on how we were creating borders with tape. How to cut away the borders in order to release the tape and have clean edges around our collaged pieces, and how there can be some problems that would arise in those types of techniques by taking the tape off. I'm also going to show you some other collaged pieces that I've done and the different types of collaging that can be done aside from what I could show you here today in this series. But again, there are many different ways and types of collage. And it doesn't have to be just stuck in a 2D form, it can also go into a 3D form as well, depending on what you're looking to collage. But I do know some people that work in 3D collage work pretty significantly."