Abstract Collage Art

I don’t do a lot of collage. I love how it looks when I see other people do it and how they are able to use it so creatively, but I always find I struggle with it myself. Two years ago, I did a daily collage journal to try and encourage myself to do more, but also to practice and improve my skills. It was a fun project and I ended up with a few compositions I was proud of, but I didn’t extend myself beyond the comfort zone I initially found myself in.

It has taken me a little while, but, with an increasingly overflowing scrap paper box, I have decided to try my hand at collaging again. This time I wanted to challenge myself to create work outside the safety of a sketchbook and try to create piece I would be happy to frame. I especially wanted to work on composition, which I would be able to translate into my painted work, and I thought collage would be a good way to practice it.

These are the piece I have created. I worked in a few styles to figure out what looked best and what I liked best. I started by using small pieces of paper with ripped edges, then adding in geometric shapes to contrast, but by the end of the process, I was only using large geometric blocks of colour.

In the later ones there are few details and complexities, but I think I needed to work like that to really focus on how to make a piece of work balance and how to create a focal point. Of course, not all of these achieved that as successfully as others, but that is the point of experimenting!

My intention, moving forward, is to progress these ideas through adding mixed media elements to the collage (with paint, pens and so forth) to build up layers of mark making, which will hopefully add back in some of those details and complexities to my simpler collages. I also want to try working with collage and paint simultaneously, to see the interplay between them.

If you are interested, I made these collages using my painted scrap papers, which I sell in packs on Etsy. You can look at the colour selections I have here.