Lesson video

So today we're going to be creating collage experiments.

And we've got five lessons where we're looking at collage but this experimental phase is crucial.

It's going to give you a really good idea as to what collage can be.

It's not limited to just one type of art.

It's not just sticking things down at random.

There's actually lots of different ways that you can create collages.

So that's the focus of today's lesson.

I've been teaching Art for many years myself.

But of course, collage is something which I come back to time and time again.

It's a great way for students, especially children who aren't confident, with drawing to create.

There's all sorts of different ways that you can learn how to improve your drawing, but equally with collage, there's all sorts of ways that you can learn little kind of fancy little skills, careful ways to fold, interesting ways to cut all these different ways to learn about collage.

So if you enjoy collage, keep finding out more.

'Cause there is a wealth of art out there that is all about collage.

This lesson, your equipments is only.

is pretty limited, you don't need too much.

You need a sketchbook, of course.

This is where your work will be stuck into.

You will need a pencil.

This won't be to draw with, this will be to write descriptions of each collage.

So this could be a pen.

If that's all you have to hand it doesn't have to be a pencil.

You do need three sheets of coloured paper.

But this could just be three sheets of paper different types of paper, as long as they're different.

That's the main thing.

So it could be newspaper, old book paper, and white paper.

It could be white paper and black paper and maybe some old wrapping paper.

As long as you have three different types of paper, then you're going to be in a good position.

Then you're going to need scissors because of course we're going to be cutting as well as ripping.

And with regards to those scissors be aware that of course they're going to be sharp.

So do make sure you are safe when using them.

Finally, we need a glue stick.

You can use PVA glue, of course, but any kind of glue stick will do the job.

Okay, so in today's lesson, we're going to do a few things.

We're going to use a sketchbook to record our learning.

Of course, it's important to keep all your artwork together and show that process of development over time.

We then going to look at some examples of collage.

There's lots of artists who have used collage.

So it's important to have a look and see what they have done.

Then we're going to explore different ways of creating collage so that we can see the different ways.

And then of course we're going to create those experiments ourselves.

We're actually going to create 12 different experiments.

But of course there's literally endless amounts.

There's an endless amount of possible collages that you can do.

Don't feel limited by the 12 that we're going to be looking at today.

There are keywords.

Of course there's words that we're going to use again and again.

And I've already used a lot of them already.

First is collage.

And as you can see from the description on your screen it's a way to cut up and stick different surfaces together to create an art piece.

It doesn't have to just be paper.

You probably have done collage in your school before.

Obviously you're doing collage with paper with me but collage can be anything.

Some artists like Rauschenberg use actual physical objects and put them in their painting.

He did a fan in the middle of one of his paintings.

So it don't have to be limited to collage in to paper.

But of course we are using paper in collage that we're doing.

The next key word is layering.

And of course that's all that process of placing one thing on top of another.

You don't have to layer for collage.

Mosaics are very similar to collage and they obviously have those small gaps in between it.

But of course, layering is a big part of collage and that's going to be important for what you're doing today.

Finally, the word experimentation is going to come up time and time again.

This lesson and the next lesson is all about experimenting and finding out different ways of creating art pieces.

Sometimes you have to be a little bit like a scientist to find out what is the best way to create an art piece.

And today it's almost like you're finding 12 little art pieces to think about which art piece looks good.

And which ones could you do more art with? Let's have a look at these three images in front of you at the moment.

What is a collage? Is really the key question here.

And crucially, when we look at these three different pieces by Tom Eckersley, by Shaheen Merali and an artist who we don't know their name.

They're all collages, but what's the difference? When you have a look and think to yourself what makes each of these so different from each other? Hopefully you've seen some ideas and already you can see obviously the first one by the Tom Eckersley is limited in the colours it uses.

It's sharp, it's neat, it's carefully cut.

It's something that requires very precise work but it is a collage.

These are layered surfaces on top of another.

So they still count as a collage.

The second piece by Shaheen Merali.

That piece you can see has got ripped images.

They're all layered on top of each other.

It's quite busy.

It's sometimes quite difficult to see what it is.

There's no particular colour scheme.

You wouldn't be able to say there's only three colours in it as you would with Tom Eckersley.

And of course there's things ripped out there that look like they're from magazines as well.

Not just from coloured paper.

That's something you can do with collage too.

The final art piece is actually textiles.

And textiles can be used for collage too.

You can use textiles in all sorts of different ways.

Like we said, collage does not have to be paper.

It can be anything.

In this case, you can see it's textiles too.

So there's a bit of an introduction to different artists.

We might come back to those artists.

In particular Tom Eckersley and Shaheen Merali, later.

But of course it shows you how different collages can be.

Now we're going to talk about presentation.

And this is going to be your first activity.

We want your presentation to look smart.

When you experiment with your work, we want it to be quite clear that these are different experiments.

They are separated in their spacing.

They're all roughly the same size.

It gives it a nice presentation to your work.

You are going to need to draw 12 rectangles.

Now you can see on the screen, something on the lines of that is absolutely fine.

If you have an A4 sketchbook.

Of course if you have a different shape sketchbook, you might have six on one page, six on another, if it's a small A5 sketchbook.

If it's a square sketchbook, you might decide to do it in four squares on each page, which of course would mean you can do four, four and another four.

So just three pages of four different designs.

But as long as you have got pre-prepared 12 rectangles or squares that you are going to work in you're going to be fine.

And again, you can see from the one on the board that A4 to 12 rectangles clearly easily fits on an A4 piece of paper.

So that's going to be your first activity to do.

You can pause the video now while you create that page of just 12 rectangles which you are going to create your collages within.

Well done there.

Of course, if you wanted to, you can obviously print out that sheet with the 12 rectangles on.

That's not a problem as well.

Whatever is easiest, because again that presentation really does matter when you are creating experiments with collage.

The next thing is choosing those three coloured pieces of paper, because you will use all three of these for every single collage you do.

But like I said at the start, don't worry if you don't have three bright colours of like red, yellow, and blue.

If you've got brown paper, black paper, an old newspaper, those three pieces of paper that you can do the same tests with that you can create the same experiment using those three pieces of paper.

As long as you have three different pieces of paper, you're all set for today's lesson.

First things first, this is the big sketchbook activity.

So this is going to take up the lion's share of your lesson today.

You're creating 12 different experiments.

Each one will be different.

So you're going to have to listen carefully to my instructions on this.

And think carefully about how you're going to create it.

You're going to spend about three minutes per collage.

So these are quick 10 minutes, you'll create three collages I hope.

Some will be faster than others I'm sure.

But of course, roughly that three minute window is all we're talking about.

If you want to set a timer for yourself that's not a bad idea.

I wouldn't want you to spend half an hour on one tiny little collage.

These are experiments.

You're just finding out how to create different art pieces.

In this case, using collage.

of course anticipate that some will obviously be better than others.

So don't get too upset if one piece doesn't work out as you want, these are experiments.

Some will work, some wont and that's okay.

Let's go.

Your collage experiment.

Your first one is ripping.

So you don't even need your scissors for this.

You're just ripping some big shapes.

We're talking about five or six different shapes.

You just need to rip them, and stick them down within that first rectangle.

Try to be careful that your rip pieces don't come out of that little rectangle.

Keep them within that rectangle on your page.

Your second one is going to be smaller ripped shapes.

So we're still ripping, but of course you want the two to be quite different.

One's got big shapes, one is small.

So you want that clear difference between the two.

And finally the last one again is ripped but it's the small lines.

Okay? So you're ripping very carefully to get those lines just right.

I'm going to give you about 10 minutes to do those three and then we're going to move on.

Your next three experiments coming up.

Again, you'll have 10 minutes to create these.

Now you're using scissors.

So of course, it's going to look very different to those ripped first three experiments.

First things first, it's squares.

These are quite easy to cut out.

you're just cutting out these small squares.

Don't get too caught up into perfect precise shapes.

Just make sure you have those little squares and that you layer them down in that space where you've created that fourth rectangle.

So that spaces that we've left out, it's all about filling those spaces as carefully as possible.

Next up, you're going to be creating a line.

So again, you're cutting these lines out.

Again they should be very different to those ripped ones in that they have those sharp edges because of those scissors.

And then finally for your sixth experiments you have triangles.

Which again, quickly these can be cut out.

I suspect all of these experiments won't take as long as the ripping, because they're quite quick to cut out.

And then of course you just need to stick them down with the glue.

But again, looking at your six collages at this stage you should already be seeing how different they are.

And these are six different ways of creating art.

And of course, you've only got about three minutes per one but of course these experiments tell you how broad collages and how much collage can be.

Your next experiment is circles and this can be tricky to cut out circles.

So don't get too upset if you can't get the perfect circle you want.

As long as you get those curved, oval shapes I think that's good enough.

You can see from my example, as well.

You can see there's only about six different circles.

So again, it's not that complicated.

And then again, just stick them down, making sure that they don't come outside of that rectangle and sit neatly within it.

Again, this is a way of creating collage as well.

The next one is about folding.

So again, it's lines but I want you to fold the paper before you stick it down.

So then you get a bit more of a textured surface up until now, they've all been quite flat but this one is going to be a bit more bumpy because of how you folded the paper.

So bear in mind that this should be a very different one to touch and to feel with the texture that you leave at the end.

And your ninth experiment is the off-cuts.

So to this point, you should have lots of little kind of odd bits of paper which you might have lying around on your table.

I want you to cut them a little bit and then stick them down so that you've got these kind of weird, reversed version of shapes, excess pieces, which you just stick down.

You can see, even though these haven't been ripped the odd shapes is an interesting type of collage as well.

Again, it's still another collage that you can do.

So again, those three you want to complete in about 10 minutes.

Now we're onto your final three experiments.

Again, these three should take 10 minutes.

The first one is cutting out shapes but leaving gaps in between the shapes.

Up until this point, everything is probably been layered to some extent.

But I don't want you to do that for this one.

I want you to purposely leave some gaps in between each shape that you stick down.

Be careful not for those pieces of paper to come outside of your rectangle that you're working within.

But of course, leaving those gaps is crucial for that technique.

The 11th experiment is very similar in that you're still leaving gaps but I want these gaps to be really, really thin so that the bit of paper behind it just barely picking through.

You can see on my example how different those two pieces are.

very similar in that they have gaps in their kind of angular shapes but of course those gaps are thin and thick.

We want that to be quite clear from one experiment to the other.

And the final experiment is all about layering again.

I want you to try and layer as much as you can on top of each other.

You can see how I've done it.

I started each shape of smaller and smaller and smaller.

I've done about eight or nine different pieces of paper on top of each other.

And it shows how layering could actually almost be 3-D as it kind of comes out of your paper.

So that should be a nice finishing piece.

And again, try and keep it within that rectangle and then have a look at your experiments.

Notice how many you've done.

Have a moment to finish off your experiments and see what you think.

Well done.

What might be good at this stage is to write down underneath each experiment.

What's the difference between each one? You might want to go back in the PowerPoint to just remind yourself, but of course you've got circles, squares, rectangles, triangles, lines, ripped.

You've got offcuts, almost quite random ones.

You've got ones with gaps and ones without gaps.

These are only 12 experiments, but these are all like I said, 12 different ways of creating art.

And again, by finding this out we now realise how much collage can be.

And how much you can do with collage.

On your next page, now write down which one is your favourite and why.

And then write down which one do you think doesn't work at all.

So something to think about for the future.

So the next question is do you remember those key words from the start? We had those key words to kind of come back to again and again.

And we've used them a lot.

Can you remember them? That's the question.

Collage, that was the first word.

We've talked about collage a lot.

So I hope that you've got that one.

I think you did.

Next one is layering.

And of course we layered a lot of different collages.

Some we didn't layer, but of course layering is a big part of collage.

And the final one is a way to create Art and prepare yourself to understand Art.

And that's experimentation.

You're sometimes like a scientist, when you experiment in art.

You're finding out different ways of doing things and choosing the best one.

The fact that you could write down which collage is successful and which ones aren't.

Show that there is a difference between the ones that you think look good.

do you think that look interesting? And people who look at your artwork will have similar judgments and think about them in the same way.

And again, experimenting is where you can find out what works and what doesn't.

Well done for getting to this point.

Now, thanks for joining me.

The next time we're going to be actually starting to look at cupcakes.

So you might want to prepare in advance by having a cupcake for yourself.

But we are going to be using cupcakes for the next lesson and creating them out of collage.

So the experiments that we've used today we're going to use them to inform what we're going to do in the next lesson.

So you can look forward to that.

Share your work of course, there's lots of ways that you can share your work on Oak National.

I'd love to see what you're producing as well.

And I look forward to seeing you next time Please do ask your parent or carer for assistance, if you you're sharing your work to social media.