Em's Collage Portrait

I had a go at collage with my arty crafty mother in law. We didn't start with anything easy and went straight to doing a portrait. Although we found it challenging we had some great outcomes. We worked together to create this image using a picture as reference and ripping pieces of magazines to create all the different tones. We did an upside down contour drawing to get the initial shapes concentrating on the shapes and tones and not what it should be (a face, nose etc). Then concentrated on the different tones in the face.

It was lots of fun and having a collection of different colours from magazines on hand saved us from having to search through magazines for the right colours. We soon learnt not to be too precious or exact with it and became relaxed. We were worried about how it was going until we had the main facial features on and scared about doing the eyes as we knew how important they were going to be. But what we have done (looking at the shape) has worked awesomely. We were surprised with some of the outcomes for example, the nose, which we thought wasn't working until we stepped back and were impressed with what we had done. You really have to keep looking at it from a distance or blurring your eyes to see how it is doing rather than always looking at it up close. It's all about the Gestalt theory. We are both keen to do more collage and already have some ideas.

Anastassia Elias is a great collage artist I have blogged before.