Exercise - Visual Distortion

collage |ˈkɒlɑːʒ, kəˈlɑːʒ|nouna piece of art made by sticking various different materials such as photographs and pieces of paper or fabric on to a backing.• [ mass noun ] the art of making collages.• a collection or combination of various things: a collage of musical genres.DERIVATIVEScollagist nounORIGIN early 20th cent.: from French, literally ‘gluing’.

For this exercise, I chose to use a picture of a Jack Russell, to work with.

I sketched the dog, trying to describe the direction in which its hair lay, around the mouth, ears and eyes, as I wanted to convey these characteristics later on in the collage piece.

The next step was then to create a drawing, but only using five lines to describe the animal.

This I found quite hard to achieve, something that was still recognizable as character was concerned, eventually after many attempts I decided to just concentrate on the head.

Once completed I then used a previous whole body, five line sketch, for a practice collage piece, working out how to recreate hair etc, then moved on to the head.

I used different magazine cutouts to create the hair, and found that using a photograph taken from a Sunday supplement magazine of a blond woman’s hairstyle, was a good thing texturally to use.

I used clothes to create an upright body shape, and the hind legs of a Jack Russell for the feet, filling in gaps using text, again from a magazine.

I chose quite an old fashioned style coat, as I found that a character started to emerge when I was doing the collage piece.

Once the collage was completed, I sketched again the character, adding a pipe to it, and ended up with a Sherlock Holmes character, or possibly Shylock Bones!

I added some period style housing as background, but felt it needed something else, so introduced a second character, still canine, dressed in a policemans tunic, bending over a body covered in a blanket.

With these other elements in place, my character was more recognizable and the narrative more apparent.

Overall I am pleased with the final image, but I did find the whole process quite difficult, in developing a character, from start to finish.

I have only ever used collage for producing a final image, not as a process tool, so it was difficult for me to use it this way.

Also keeping the characteristics I drew, in the first sketch were difficult to maintain after I had produced the collage image.

While working on this exercise, I searched on the internet for artists that use collage in their work:

Samuel Price

Samuel Price believes in the use of accessible materials as part of his art creation.  When young he could not afford expensive art materials to work with, so chose to cut out magazines and newspapers that were lying around his studio.  He likes to create unique collages, manipulating colour, shapes and textures in the process, and is best known for his dog ones.

Ed Young - Illustrator

Ed Young has illustrated over 80 books, including several he has written himself.

He was born in Tientsin, China, and moved to America in the 1950s, and worked as a graphic designer before changing profession and becoming a childrens book illustrator.

He has worked in many mediums, from Chinese paper cuts, to soft pastels.

He won the Caldecott Medal for his telling of a Chinese Red Riding Hood, fable.

For the collage work on book ‘Wabi Sabi’, Young’s style was influenced by Henri Matisse collage designs.

He lays out all the collage pieces first, so that he can make adjustments, before gluing it.