Collage is never dull -- Making 40+ abstract backgrounds in just 15 minutes

Tuesday was another half-day collage class, hosted by artist John in his well-stocked and well-ventilated garage. It was over 80 F outside (which qualifies as heat emergency in the Northwest), but we stayed cool amidst our paper scraps, matte medium, solvent and stencils.

Today's lesson was surface transformation. That's a fancy artist term for changing the material you're working with -- paper, fabric, whatever.

We spent a good part of the day in distress. Well, in distressing -- transforming pages of National Geographic into abstract images. Like these.

Citrasolv

It was almost too easy. We slathered Citrasolv, a citrus-based solvent, on each page of the magazine and then let it dry.

After 15 minutes, we pulled out the pages and let them dry on John's lawn. 

And in his bushes.

Some of the pages looked like images from the Hubble Space Telescope.

Most of mine weren't as dramatic. I was too stingy with the Citrasolv, I think. The more you pour on, the more dramatic the effect.

The Citrasolv manufacturer's site includes detailed instructions  and videos on this technique as well as other surface treatments, and an artist gallery.

Never Dull

Next John showed us how to use Never Dull, a silver polish, to selectively remove ink from magazine pages.

We used Elmer's glue as to mask off parts of the image we didn't want to erase. After the glue dried, we applied the Never Dull. The ink came off easily.

To create the image below, I put a stencil on the original image and covered the open space with glue. When I used the Never Dull, the stencil shape was revealed. I started with a photo of a line of race boats.

Using altered pages as background

In the last hour of the workshop, we created a new spread in the art journal we'd started in the first session. We used the pages we'd altered for the background. Here's mine.