Day 26: Snake
I have come to realise that pretty much all of the collages that I’ve done so far are connected to my childhood, or connected to my travels – and all of them connect to nature (except for one anomaly which is from my childhood but not of the nature theme). Which I knew already, objectively.
But I think this is more significant than I realise – I want to start paying attention to the things that these stories have to tell me.
This snake, for example. Snakes were a big part of growing up in Singapore and frequently making jungle trips around South East Asia. We always welcomed a snake sighting – I just think they’re so cool. We saw them in the garden, on the way to school, in the mangrove reserves in Singapore, in the park…
There are so many beautiful species of snake. This one is supposed to be a type of viper, though I don’t think I’ve mastered the details of animals yet with collage…
Either way, I wanted to capture the beautiful green and the scale pattern, which I think turned out quite well.
In Singapore we would have many guests in the garden – stunning green tree snakes, pythons, monitor lizards, and birds such as sun birds, or laughing thrushes.
It’s no wonder that my art reflects nature!
What themes have snuck into your art? (Even if it’s not ‘sneaky’, sometimes we just don’t notice why this happens in our own work, or what it’s trying to tell us)
Day 27: Goldfinch
This is a Goldfinch – my first European bird so far! These pretty birds come into the garden sometimes, their distinctive red faces on display.
This collage took me almost all day, for some reason. First of all, I hadn’t painted a background colour that I liked so I did paint a couple of extra sheets, so I had to wait for those to dry.
I also changed the brown colour on the bird a couple of times, so that took a while.
And then adding all the details took a bit of time on top of that.
Overall, I’m quite happy with this piece, even though my super critical eye still doesn’t completely like the shape of the bird. But it’s not too bad for a first try.
Day 28: Daylily
This was inspired by a beautiful flower in my mum’s garden – it’s called a daylily apparently. As much as I love doing collages of flowers, I’m sad to say I don’t know the names of any of them. So finally, I can name one!
I love the colours of this one, and it was fun to focus just on one larger flower.
I eyeballed the petals and kept things loose, as I have been doing for a lot of my collages. I like the looser element of collage, because it’s the opposite of my usual style of the lines. For this collage, before I glued the petals down, I drew the veins on with some colour pencils. I didn’t want them to be super obvious, so I didn’t choose the crayons for this one.
I’ve been really liking the collages because it’s allowing me to loosed up with my art, which is so opposite to what I do with the line drawings. It’s very freeing. What style of art do you prefer to do?
Day 29: Chameleon
So this is an animal that I’ve never seen, because I’ve never been to the part of the world where they’re found. But when I saw a photo of it, I loved the colours and the textures, so I wanted to try anyway.
To experiment with texture for the green base, I used tissue paper for the first time – I painted directly onto the tissue paper to stick it onto printer paper – so I didn’t glue down the tissue paper first, but instead just tried directly with paint.
I added a few colours to the base paint later, and then I added loads of splatters of yellow and lighter green over the top.
I also added some highlights with crayon, once I’d put the chameleon together.
Overall, I like the result and would want to try again for some improvements. But this was fun to make, and I think the experiment of using tissue paper turned out well.
Day 30: Wild Flowers
As you can see in the reference photo that I took of wildflowers, somewhere in Germany (I can’t remember exactly where), there are so many more flowers in the photo than in the collage.
I had to simplify this one a lot, and chose some interesting shapes of the flowers to create a few different types.
I’m happy with how this turned out, I like the colours and the different flowers. I think it would be cool one day to create a really big piece with even more detail, but maybe I’m getting ahead of myself…
This was a good week, though I feel like the collages are taking longer and longer. I don’t know if that means I’m doing more complex images, or if I’ve just lost some adrenaline… Who knows! I have three more weeks of this summer art project, and I need to start thinking about my next project. I’m thinking I want to start experimenting with combining collages and line drawings… So many ideas to think about.
