drawanyway.com

When I was a student, I used to decorate my walls with - well, almost anything that caught my eye. I’d tear pictures out of magazines, and put them up next to postcards, photos, flyers - all sorts.

I never seemed to lose that habit of holding on to small scraps of paper and items that appealed to me, but I did grow up a bit, and begin to favour a more restrained style of interior decoration. So one day I got organised, and put all the bits of paper in a big box marked ‘collage’. On another supremely and uncharacteristically efficient day, I even sorted them by colour into individual transparent file pockets.

Collage is one of those maligned art forms that suffers from being something that children do at playgroup, and thus perceived as not serious. However, it has a lot to recommend it.

- You don’t have to be able to draw to make a good collage. Other skills, like a good eye for colour, composition or texture might come into play, and drawing might help in some cases, but it’s perfectly possible to make a very appealing collage without any drawing ability at all.

- It’s quicker than painting, but you end up with something colourful. Or at least coloured. If you want to. I mean, you could make a black and white collage, obviously.

- It’s also less messy than painting, especially if you use a glue stick rather than gloopy glue.

- It was good enough for Picasso. What, you’re saying you know better than him?

- You can do it alongside your child. Children seem to enjoy tearing, cutting and sticking.

At its most basic, a collage can simply be a juxtaposition of pleasing shapes and colours that go together to make an abstract pattern. But you can also use pieces of colour to build up a figurative picture of anything you like.

The one thing that will stand you in good stead is a box like mine (ha ha, please ignore any double meaning here, it is not intended! Damn you trans-Atlantic readers with your strange ways). I’ve been collecting for several years, and as you can see in the photo above, its contents include stamps, stickers, ribbons, pieces of metal flattened by cars, old cards, wrapping paper, labels, sweet wrappers, maps, bits of foreign newspaper, playing cards, dried flowers…

If you’re the sort of person who hates to throw away, say, postcards from friends, but you don’t know where to store them, this is an ideal solution. The one criterion is that everything you save should be attractive or intriguing to you, in some way.

Sorting scraps into broad colour bands saves a lot of time when it comes to making pictures, and it also means that you can make excellent compositions which stick to one or two colour palettes.

I will make a collage tomorrow and post it here; meanwhile, I cannot expect anyone to immediately come up with enough suitable material to make one too, but if you just happen to have things to hand that you think would make a good collage, then, of course, go ahead. Otherwise, I guess your task is, if you want, of course, to start looking for a suitable box, and start noticing, and keeping, attractive materials. Like all the other posts so far, I’ll keep this one open in case you’d like to come back and post your future work.