Exercise 4.2 – Comparing my two collages
I can see that my first collage looks a little more playful, but that the overlaps of paper look less messy and less muddled on my second collage, and they look more like wrapped bundles. This is especially noticeable on the bottom right bundle.
The composition on collage 2 is more accurate for each bundle, but I think I enjoy the look of the composition more overall on collage 1; it’s more engaging to look at as a piece of work separate from the objects it’s portraying. That feels important for a work of art made with collage.
The colours and shapes match well on each piece. On the second collage the fact there are more pieces, and they are more accurately cut shapes, helps show that the colours relate to, and depict, something.
Moving forward I’d like to take the playful nature of collage 1 and mix it with the accuracy of collage 2. This might mean drawing more freely, or drawing some shapes and free-hand cutting others. Also playing with the composition more before I stick them down.
Exercise 4.3: Surface Pattern
After creating patters and texture on my papers, I was ready to begin. I chose to do a mixture of drawing my shapes and cutting directly after seeing what I liked from the first exercise. I used three different compositions, each looking at the entire bundle, but some closer and some further away. For my second piece I focused solely on one bundle by itself.
After becoming frustrated with the finished collages I stopped and evaluated why between my second and third collages. I realised what I’d been struggling with was getting consistent scale for the individual collage pieces; though most of them are correctly shaped, or at least make a good representation of the composition, they don’t always sit well together because their sizes don’t match across the board. I had tried to use this to good effect by going with the spontaneity and still trying to make the compositions look appealing on the page even though they didn’t perfectly match my bundles, but decided to be especially careful and check my pieces against each other for the third collage before cutting.
I also realised that in choosing a composition I had to think not only about what looked good in my thumbnails with pencil, but about how that would translate into a collage– where things look very different without shading, in flatter blocks of colour. This was easier to do when I had more collages under my belt, and I was able to choose more carefully for my last collage by combining the results of a couple of thumbnails and by making a new, smaller bundle to compliment the other two.
This reminded me of what I learned at the end of Part 3, of having to evaluate what makes a good drawing for the medium being used and the intended outcome. And with this I was able to move onto collage three more confidently.
This all resulted in a third collage that I am much happier with, not only for the collage itself but for how it relates to what was in front of me. I still took some creative license; not all of the string is depicted line for line, and I arranged some of the pieces differently before finally sticking them down, so that it looked more balanced on the page– but I think it is the most successful of the three and shows off the patterned papers I created to best effect.
Exercise 4.4: Material Surface
Exercise 4.4- I found looking for the shapes and forms I wanted in my composition much easier by this point, and chose my compositions fairly easily, even which bits to eliminate from the final piece. I like the shapes of both compositions overall, and find them to be interesting in and of themselves in an abstract way, as well as fairly easily recognisable as the bundle.
Though I realised once I had finished them that I had focused on the shapes and chosen interesting forms, but that the colours in the compositions were all grouped together rather than spread over the page. This bothers me a bit, and it’s something I wished I’d thought more about.
Summing up:
I was able to create papers that matched well to the fabrics, but I also managed to have the painted paper tones look cohesive together, throughout these exercises. The patterns and designs on the paper I created were sometimes too large or spread too sparsely across the pages to show up once the collage pieces were cut, so size and scale are something to bear in mind moving forward.
Being happy with the colour choices helped and my initial bundles were mostly soft, rounded shapes and my collages portray that well; the folds and dips in the fabric were lost somewhat in the flatness of collage until I realised using more pieces of paper showed more intricate forms. The shapes are interesting in my initial exercises but they don’t all look like the bundles.
I feel I have a better thought and planned composition by the end of exercise 4.3, that is a great representation of what was in front of me and also looks like folds of fabric, and even if you look at it without the bundles next to it I feel it looks like fabric parcels and groups of folded material.
In exercise 4 I managed to utilize my new-found confidence, and those collages have some interesting abstract shapes. I think they are a broad representation of composition rather than picture perfect accuracy, partly because I left out some aspects of the bundle to create more unique compositions.
What matters when choosing compositions depends on what materials you are drawing with and what the intended result is. When flat shapes and patterns are involved things can look quite different. It reminds me of the printmaking techniques from an earlier section of the course, where the forms and shapes you want to depict need to be well thought out, but you can exaggerate and simplify as needed to make things work on the page.
Accuracy also seems especially important for showing folds and form in fabric, for it to make sense to the eye. You can simplify, but it also needs to look like the object in question. I will try to take that forward as I move through the next topics.
Rebekah's OCA Learning Log 