This past weekend I took part in a collage workshop at The Mainstreet Art Centre in Lake Zurich, IL. It was taught by Laura Lein-Svencner. What a fun but intense workshop! I never realized how labor intensive collage can be!
We spent the whole first day preparing our papers with staining, stenciling,crinkling, removing color with a metal polishing compound,gessoing, and polymer, polymer, polymer! All our twenty papers or so had to be polymered on both sides, and transfers had 3 layers of polymer on one side only. So all day it was a constant stream of artists brushing on the polymer or gesso, and carefully carrying their papers one at a time to the back room to let them dry on newspapers that were stacked everywhere on tables and on the floor!
The second day Laura did a complete demo for about an hour and a half. Then she gave us some small squares of watercolor paper and some of her sample papers(three very small pieces, about 2" x 3", and a couple of transfers. We were to do practice runs with these three and tear or cut the papers, arrange them and tack them down with a special little heating iron. Then more polymer, then shading around areas on our pieces to make them more dimensional, adding some pastel if we wished, spray with fixative, polymer, add transfers, tack, moisten the back of the transfer to remove the paper, quickly polymer to avoid a bloom, add beads or what-not....I am exhausted! And most of you will say "what in the world is she talking about!"
ANYWAY...below are my first efforts with collage. The first 3 are our practice squares, about 4" square, the fourth and fifth are using our own papers and "Found" objects. I my, case the flowers and the sunbather that are mixed in with my papers. These collages are larger. One is 6" square, the other is 6" x 4".
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