Leafdays

I made my very first collages when I was a little girl at school. I remember loving it because I had always been into art but never very good at drawing or painting. Collage was a way to circumvent my artistic shortcomings and still “paint” things. What I did at the time was what I have come to think of as classic collage—sticking pieces of paper onto canvas or board to create new images.

Life then took me in different directions and, for a while, I stopped collaging. I rediscovered it a few years ago but I did it digitally, using individual images—birds, butterflies, flowers—to create a wider composition. Because imaging software is so easy for me to use, digital collage was a way to express my creativity quickly and easily. Once you have figured how to make digital backgrounds and create custom brushes, making a digital collage is a piece of cake. You can either replicate traditional collage by “glueing” elements on your canvas (you do so by giving each image a shadow, so it looks distinct from the background) or you can mimic image transfer techniques by blending your visual focus elements seamlessly with the background.

Digital collage mirroring image transfer techniques





Digital collage mirroring traditional collage

All of which was great and very enjoyable, but I found myself missing the tactile quality of old-fashioned collage. Sure I could scan lace and add it to my digital pieces, but, once printed, the work didn’t quite give me the same enjoyment as one with real lace I could touch, as well as see. And that’s how I got into hybrid collages, which are my current passion.There are two ways to create a hybrid collage: digital to real, and real to digital to real. Let me explain. Digital to real consists in creating and printing a digital collage and attaching some real elements—lace, say, or ribbon, or a photograph—to complete the work. Real to digital to real means creating all the collage elements in the real world—paintings, photographs etc—scanning them in and assembling them digitally as appropriate, then printing them and creating the composition out of the printed and real elements. The latter is my favourite way of working because it allows me to handle the trickiest collage techniques digitally (image transfer, applying colour to vintage photographs) while retaining the whole textural quality of a real collage.Here is how I go about creating this type of hybrid collage. First I select my base elements—usually the photograph that will be the focus of my collage ‘story’ plus some ephemera that I feel go with it. In the example below, I chose a picture of my son as a toddler, plus a page from an old book, an old map, a letter and a piece of an old newspaper page featuring a ship.

Then I paint some backgrounds in matching colours using gouache or acrylics or, occasionally, wax or oil crayons or distress inks. In this case, I used a painting my son had made.

I scan the whole lot at 800 dpi (huge, so I’ll be able to resize everything to fit my needs) and start arranging them digitally.I fill a blank canvas (of the size I want my final collage to be) with a painted background, then ‘tear’ virtual strips of ephemera and ‘image transfer’ them onto the canvas in layers, using the same selection, feathering and blending techniques I use to create digital backgrounds. Sometimes I also add ‘strips’ of digital backgrounds I have made in the past. The crucial thing here is that each collage element has a layer of its own. This allows me to try different arrangements and experiment with the design simply by moving the layers around (that’s the advantage of working digitally).

Once I am happy with the composition, I place the main image onto the canvas to give my work more direction. I very very rarely use a whole image. More often than not I only want a portion of it, and, to make my life easier at cutting stage, I prefer to select the portion I want to use directly in Photoshop. I do so by using the Magnetic Lasso tool to isolate the bit of image I want in my collage. To ensure the edges are not obvious, I feather the selection by 2 to 5 pixels and copy the image onto the collage.

I also retouch the image digitally, removing blemishes or dirt (quite common in old pictures) and colouring it where appropriate. To remove blemishes, I duplicate the image (Layer→ Duplicate layer) and use Photoshop’s clone stamp (I select the clone tool from the Tools bar, and choose the airbrush option in a very small size). The tool works by cloning a selected area of the picture over the one you want to remove. You select the area by clicking the ALT key on a PC or the option key on a MAC. To avoid any visible corrections, I choose the area closest to the imperfection I want to remove.I also add blush to vintage images of ladies by using the Photoshop brush tool (again I choose the airbrush option in a suitably small size). I place the colour in a separate layer (Layers→ New layer), which I then blend in by adjusting the opacity (see the digital background tutorial to find out how to do this).

Now that I have a very clear idea what the collage will look like, I can start rummaging for the finishing touches. This happens both digitally and not.

Digitally, I create custom brushes, or use brushes I have already created, to add interest to the piece. I also generate text that I’ll later glue to the collage. In the real world, I look for other ephemera, ribbons, buttons, lace and trimmings that will help complete the composition. Once I have everything in hand, it is time to flex my printer’s muscles.

Every element that I want to stand out in the collage is printed separately. So, for example, I will print the “image-transfer” style background all together, but will print the photograph, text and main elements in different sheets of paper. Often I’ll use different types of paper too to play up each part of the collage—the background goes onto watercolour paper, the photograph on glossy photo paper, and the elements on watercolour or matte photo paper.

The rest is straightforward traditional collage job. I cut or tear each element, and get out either gel medium or a clear glue.Then the first step is to paste the background on a hard support—maybe a painted canvas, or painted cardboard. Then I assemble the printed elements and the ‘real’ elements together. Because the digital mock up gave me a good idea of the composition, I like to paste them from the bottom up—meaning that I tend to glue the visual focus last so it sits at the very top of the collage layers.