Collage Focus: Line

An Introduction to Line as a Design Element - through Collage

Hello, collagers!

Welcome to our first focus topic!

Art Element: LINE

I hope you had fun thinking about the materials you might want to add to your collage stash and have cleared a little space to start creating! There are many ways to collage, but whatever your style, materials, or methods, I hope Collage Circle will allow you to think about art and collage in new ways.

For the next few weeks, we’ll discuss Line as one of the Elements of Art & Design.

This short video will get us started. Then, during the week I’ll share what I’ve done with my collage materials while also setting up an informal system for us to share our creations. (Watch for more news next time!)

Happy creating!

~ Jennifer

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{Video Transcript}

Welcome to my collage table. Today I want to introduce you to starting some collages. Hopefully, you've been collecting a few items around your home and found a few things that would be fun to collage with. I've collected a few things here for myself, and we'll start talking about different methods and techniques for collage and get started on a design element for today.

Some of the things I like to collect is something to use as the backing. So I have a couple of different things here I could use to back my little collage. Most of my collages when I'm working with vintage materials have been pretty small. I like to work with little small sizes that will fit on a card.

So I have these blank cards that I can then put my collage on and then share with other people. And this time of year, I especially like making little collages that I can turn into Valentine's cards. So that's a fun way to use your vintage supplies and get them into the hands of people who might be interested in your little works of art.

And then to keep at hand for when I'm assembling my collages, I like to have some sort of board that I can use for punching or gluing, something that protects my table. I like using an awl for punching holes when I want to do work with thread like embroidery, thread or other fibers. Always good to have a pair of scissors handy. And then I tend to tack everything down with a glue stick.

I have been using this craft glue stick, but any glue stick should be able to do the job. I keep a little tin full of supplies that I might find useful. So I have some pins that I might want to pin things down. A little tin with my needles for when I want to do embroidery. And then I like to use little binder clips to hold collage pieces together. I have a threading tool for my needle and some thread of a favorite color that I like to use. My little tin of handy supplies that I can then take around with me wherever I am working, whether I'm working here at the table or in a comfortable chair in the living room I can easily take my supplies with me.

And then lately I've been using a reference book in order to help me with some of the stitching designs I like to put on to my collage pieces. And that is obviously totally optional. You can do all gluing and and no stitching for sure. But I found this is a good book that gives me lots of instructions on how to do different types of stitches that I might find interesting on my collages.

And then what we're going to be talking about over the next several weeks is how to use line work in your collage pieces and what lines are used for in art in general, and how to think about lines in maybe a new way. Just as a quick example, I have a little card here with different types of lines you could add to your piece from simple hand-drawn lines.

So you can use a pen or pencil or crayons or whatever drawing materials you might have, and you can create lines that way, or you can stitch lines in different ways and get really creative with your stitches. If you have some sort of experience with that or have a stitch dictionary to help you, and then you can create a line just by putting two pieces together or leaving space between pieces.

So there's lots of ways to think about how you might want to organize or create lines in your pieces. And I just want to share different ways to think about it, different ways to use lines, different reasons why we might choose one line or over another. And that's going to be what we'll be discussing over the next several weeks.

When I was thinking about how to talk about line with collage work, a lot of the ways I like to create lines is through stitching. And so these are all done with my machine. I don't have a fancy machine. I just have a singer machine. That's a very entry level and it's really fun to use them. You can use them in a couple of different ways.

You can use it to actually stitch onto your pieces or you can use it to make the holes that you will then hand stitch into. So there's different ways you can use your sewing machine. You can use it with thread or without thread, and they're both very fun ways to use it when you're stitching designs onto your collages, if you don't have a machine, that fear not because that's what I use my little awl for.

So if I want to add some design elements to my collage with stitch, I can use the awl with this backing board to punch little holes into my piece that I can then use to stitch because I'm often layering several different layers of book pages and postcards and photographs and different materials. I have found it's much easier to stitch it if I pre punch it in some way, either with a machine or with an awl.

So now that you have your class materials with you and you have some tools with which to collage, now comes the fun part when you get to start making collages. And I would suggest just starting small like I have. So a postcard sized or smaller. Since this one I've created just using a section of a book cover on which to collage on top of. So it's just a little small collage. I really like doing the tiny ones like that. This one's kind of a medium size collage, as you can see, and I've added a little coin embellishment onto it, and this is the size. I generally do more of a postcard size than I can transfer onto a card. Typically, I start with some sort of backing.

So in this case, I think I'm going to use this is an old card I found and I'm going to use the front of the card as my backing for my collage. I just think that's a really pretty color combination and I think it could be a nice feature to a collage and then I'll probably cut out some different shapes out of this postcard, and I might just cut out little circle dots to add to the piece.

And then I found these old Easter SEAL stickers in a vintage collection, and I'll use those to embellish it as well. And I found this funny little can cover it, an antique shop. And I just thought it'd be fun to use this in some sort of way with this collage as well. Not sure exactly what I'm going to do with that yet.

And then I just had some random threads that I had laying around. I'm very messy when it comes to working with stitch and collage, so I end up with little piles of threads left over that I haven't used. And so we're going to try to use up some of those. When I do this collage this week and then I have some ribbon, and ribbon is a great way to create lines and you're close to you can show it on in lots of different ways.

Some book pages can be fun as well. This is a vintage book I found and you can even take the cover of it and turn it into a great backing board for your collage. I really love looking at different vintage materials and thinking about the possibility of how they can be reconstructed in a new and interesting way to create an interesting design or design that tells a story or a design that just feels good in the moment.

It doesn't have to be anything that anyone else understands but you. And maybe you don't even understand what you're doing with it either. And that's okay. I think it's exciting to try to put pieces together and make a design or tell a story in an unexpected new way. Our basic steps going into this collage series is gathering some supplies, creating a layer of materials, using some glue to tack them together.

And it doesn't have to be completely glued just enough to tack them together so that a hold or if you don't want to do that, then using the binder clips to hold things in place while you either like send it through sewing machine or do some hand stitching, or if you don't want to do any stitching at all, just using the glue stick to glue the pieces together.

That works too. And then after you've created some sort of composition with your layers of materials, then maybe play with some embellishments like this piece I added a coin to or maybe you have a button you want to add to it, or maybe a piece of ribbon that you want to tie to it. There's lots of embellishments you can add to make it fun, as well as for going through the process over the next few weeks of playing with our collages and trying some new designs and trying some materials, as we go through that, we're going to be talking about you use line for and the different ways of creating lines within your work

lines can be used very structurally in your piece or they can be used very emotionally, intuitively, and it's all up to you - color, the direction, the shape, the size. There's lots of considerations in something as simple as adding a line to your work, and each of them adds a different type of motion or feel or context to your piece.

But you can also just go with your intuition and have fun putting lines into your piece in order to connect all your pieces together in some way and just play with it.

So over the next few weeks I will be posting what I'm doing with lines in my collages. I hope you will share what you're working on with your collages, so make sure you stay tuned and you're signed up for collage circle.

Paying subscribers will receive every post in the series. Free Subscribers will get an occasional post, but whether you're a free subscriber or a paid subscriber, I hope everyone has fun with collage. I hope you have fun finding and collecting materials you can use around your home or when you're out and about. And I just hope you have a lot of fun playing with the materials.

Thanks for being here.