Lesson 8: Collage Creation.
Cropping, Arranging and Framing.
This exercise affords us the opportunity to talk about arrangement of artwork. Throughout the course I have been talking about defining you working space. Now comes time when this habit of thinking about the positive and negative aspects of the space defined your drawing comes into play. When you push and pull the images around the page you will be thinking about placement. Placement is influenced by these factors...
- 1. Empty Space. Sometimes leaving parts of a design empty is called... Creating a Rest Area. If we don’t create places in our drawings where the eye can rest it may become too ‘busy.’ Often the viewer will be compelled to look away. And that is certainly not what we want!
- 2. Cropping. Cropping can be likened to tidying up. Get rid of messy edges. (Or accentuate them if you want to keep them.) See whether some areas are just extra at the edges and need to be trimmed. I tend to be severe when cropping both the images I am tidying to fit into a collage and then the entire collage when it is ready for framing. If you have cropped severely you can always balance the design when placing a mat around the design before framing.
- 3. Colour Contrasting Between Subject and Frame. This is a great way to make your artwork dynamic or to imbue meaning into the design by playing on softness and subtlety. For example you can make your work enigmatic! If you wanted to increase the subtlety mat the work with a similar colour or a colour from the original colour combination. If you wish to enhance dynamism go for a contrast or a colour that will make the colour scheme even more complex.
- 4. Meaning Imbued by Space and Complexity. By this I mean you can increase the complexity of collage by increasing your tendency to overlap and by really putting effort into issues of placement…such as bunching up at corners, or creating trails within your picture plane. This aspect of design is mentioned in the lesson on Abstraction.
- 5. Multiple Edgings. This situation arises when the artist becomes as involved in borders, frames and edges as he/she is with the artwork itself. This kind of preoccupation is about spatial design. Spatial design is the subject for an entire course! So I guess you might at this stage just be aware that edges, borders and frames can really make your work dynamic! Remember the point I keep making .....it pays occasionally to become preoccupied with an aspect of design before returning to the real task at hand….
- 6. Bleeding It To The Edge. This is a bit of an old slang saying. It means that we often tend to be shy and precious with our work. Bleeding it to the edge means stretching it out to the edges and not being apologetic about placement or size.
- 7. Distortion. An abstract concept. Don’t forget that in the making of collage it is perfectly okay to use any means of creating the image you find challenging. So…if you have a scanner and you would like to create distorted dynamos the way Dali did? Distort your drawing in an image editor and then stick it down.
