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Collage Art Class

Saturday night my husband was out of town so I took advantage of a night with no lacrosse games, dance classes or riding lessons and we did the 4th class in my series of art classes I’m giving my kids. This week’s lesson was on collage.

Collage Art Class. And yes, that sewing machine is pretty much permanently on our dining table.


This all started because my husband wanted me to sign Maia up for another drawing class like she took last year, and I, frankly, just couldn’t bear the thought of dragging my  kids to one more thing. And why should just Maia get art class when all of my kids enjoy art? I figured for the price of sending 3 kids to art class I could buy all of the art supplies I needed and give them little “snapshots” of lots of different kinds of art. Plus, then we would own the supplies so they could explore all of these different mediums whenever they wanted to after that.

While we got off to a rocky start by being unprepared and overambitious in the first class, the next two have been wildly successful and I find my kids, Evan in particular, asking to do them whenever we have some free time. I love that. Now I’m not a trained artist, but I am artistic and I know a little about a lot of different art forms. Certainly enough to teach my kids the basics about them. For the fine drawing and painting classes they’ll have to go to an art school.

Gathered collage materials ready for class



While I must admit I’ve never sat down and done collage in any formal sense, I was more than adequately prepared supply-wise. I’m drowning in papers, doo-dads, stamps, paints, buttons, stickers, scrapbooking supplies, fabrics, ribbons, etc. And I did order two great books on the subject. One was called Collage Lab by Bee Shay, and the other Collage Journeys by Jane Davies. I found both of these books inspirational and informative. Before we started “class” I gave each of my kids the Collage Lab book to look through and had them pick out their favorite one or two pieces to give them time to think about what they wanted to do.  I also prepared the thin art boards I had bought for them ahead of time, just as a time-saving measure.


This board has 3 layers of tissue paper applied to the art board. The first one was orange, the second one was green and the last layer was blue. You can see how all of the colors bleed through in varying degrees and creates a lovely starting palette.



The kids didn’t really need a lot of direction for this class, which was great. India and I both loved a collage in the Collage Lab book that had a bird in a nest made of printed strips of paper. While we both did that in our collage, they’re different because I used quotes that were appropriate for me, and India used quotes that she loved.

Here’s my bird’s nest.



And here’s India’s bird’s nest.



India’s finished collage.



Evan’s finished collage.


Maia’s finished collage



And my finished collage.



I was having so much fun I grabbed some photos of mine I’d just had printed and started working on a series of collage postcards that was really fun to do.



And then I framed one of my favorite photos from my recent trip to Texas. I cut a custom mat our for the frame out of foam-core, covered it with a beautiful rust-colored rice paper, and then embellished that with different fibers I had. I love the way it came out.



I added a saying from my post of that photo as photo of the day, and I sanded the edges of the photo to soften it and give it a more aged look.



So another successful art class done. There’s a lot more to learn and discover about this collage stuff, so I suspect we’ll be re-visiting this a few more times.

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