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Apologies if you are getting bored with me going on about collage; I will move on to new topics tomorrow.

It’s just that actually making a collage over the weekend reminded me of some techniques that will make it easier for you if you haven’t done much before. This is just the way I work, mind you - your way could be totally different, of course, and if so, I’d love to hear about it. Not least because this method most definitely doesn’t accord with the drawanyway ten-minute promise.

OK, so I already talked about my collage box. Now I’m going to talk through how I use it, specifically when I’m making a figurative picture. Abstracts have their own logic and I’m sure I’ll come back to that later.

Here’s what you need:

- Paper or card, strong enough to take glue and a layer or two of stuck-on paper (or heavier materials if that is what you plan to use)

- Scissors or a scalpel knife (I mentioned before that collage is a good activity to do with kids; I don’t need to tell you that a scalpel knife is for adults only, I’m sure)

- Glue: my favourites are glue sticks such as Pritt - light, mess-free; and rubber-based glue such as Copydex, which allows you to rub away any excess

- Your collage box, or, alternatively, a bunch of magazine pages or old photos/postcards etc.

- Tracing paper

- A pencil - a good sharp one if you are working to a fairly small scale

Method:

1. First I draw out my basic picture on the paper - remember that the more detailed it is, the more fiddly and time-consuming your work is going to be.

2. Then I think about which materials are going to work best. A while back I mentioned how some media and materials just go together well. This is true for all types of art. So, in fact, it’s possible that point 1 and point 2 will be swapped over for you - in other words, the materials you have to hand might actually suggest a subject.

3. I then trace the picture I sketched out onto tracing paper with pencil. This allows me to cut out pieces of collage paper very precisely to fit into the areas where I want them. A looser collage could of course be done by eye.

4. You probably remember doing this at primary school - I turn the tracing paper over and scribble on the reverse side of the lines with pencil. This means that I can then place the tracing paper over my collage material (right way up) and draw over the line again, and this leaves a faint imprint of the exact shape I need, which I can then cut out with scissors. If there’s an internal space, that’s where the scalpel comes in handy.

5. Glue the piece in place, repeat until complete.

Some additional thoughts:

> One of the nicest aspects of collage is that the finished picture is both what it represents, and the materials you chose to make it out of. So, once you feel confident, it’s quite nice to include a few easily identifiable materials - that’s why I like to use Air Mail labels, stamps, and such like. A handwritten letter can also make for some interesting cut-outs. For a really good trick, though, marry form and content - so a picture of a cup of coffee could be made of sugar packets.

> There’s no rule to say you can’t mix collage and other media, so you can add paint or pen or anything else to your finished product - or my old fall-back, touching it up on Photoshop.

> Unfortunately, collage is harder to preserve than many other media, but as Rachel commented on my original collage post, scanning or photocopying your original work can be a nice final step: often you don’t lose the three-dimensionality of the piece at all. Threads from ripped up cloth, or the fibres of torn paper all seem to show up in fine detail. or of course, if you love your work, you could frame it.

Task for today? Try this out - or, if it sounds like too much faff, take the day off and tomorrow I’m promising something quicker and easier.