For this collage piece, you want to choose a location or place that has some significance to you. It could be something like a park that you visited often as a child, or perhaps somewhere you went on vacation and remember fondly. It doesn’t have to be somewhere that is conventionally beautiful or detailed, just a place that is important to you as a person. Take your time to try and think of a place that you believe could inspire an interesting collage. Before you begin creating your work, it’s important for you to first think of the different objects that would be in the scene and the colors that you want to use in the piece. You can select colors based on the objects that are present in the place you’ve chosen, but any colors that inspire you will work. For this project, you will need a set of specific tools to aid you: ʆ A sheet of poster board that will act as the base of your collage ʆ Lots and lots of colored paper—make sure that you have too much as opposed to too little! ʆ Scissors—make sure they are sharpened so that they cut the paper neatly! ʆ Glue to adhere the pieces of colored paper to your poster board Once you have gathered your materials, you will then follow the steps below to create your cut-out. Make sure that you take your time, especially when you are cutting out the different shapes and placing them onto the poster board. Once they are glued down, they will be very difficult to move around. Follow each of the steps below to complete your work: ʆ Use your scissors to cut out a variety of shapes. Do not trace the shapes out beforehand; instead use your eyesight to cut out the general shape of what you’re envisioning. You aren’t going for realism in this piece, so having some abstraction is a good thing. Matisse referred to this style as “drawing with scissors” for this very reason. [81] Arts Anywhere – Art History II: 1901–2014 [82] ʆ Organize where you want your cut-outs on the poster board. Make sure that you really take your time with this step and organize them the way that you want them. You can utilize the white space of the poster-board as well. Find a way to place them down that makes you content and conveys the atmosphere of the location that you have chosen for this piece. Make sure that you are imagining the setting that you chose as you create your piece. This way, the atmosphere will be well captured in your work. ʆ Glue down your cut-outs. Once you have determined where you want them to go, you will then glue down your cut-outs to your poster board. It helps if you take a photograph of your placement before you move them off to glue them down. This way, you will remember how they were organized. Carefully glue them down, and try not to use too much glue. Too much glue will warp the cut outs when it dries. Once that’s done, you’ve successfully created your own Matisse-inspired cut-out piece! As your work is drying, take some time to write out an artist’s statement explaining what your subject matter is, why that location is important to you and why you chose the colors and shapes that you did. Finally, submit an image of the project and your artist’s statement to your instructor
