Tag: found paper collage

Flowers for the Table

August 27, 2025

Dear Liza,

Sometimes I need to make a few tries at a project before I get it right. At our last ZOOM art group, Ruthie Inman had us start this vase of flowers, made with the windows from business envelopes. Mine turned out really tiny, about three inches high, and I wasn’t crazy about it.

The other members of the group used bigger windows from bigger envelopes, and therefore, bigger flowers. I liked theirs better, so I found just such an envelope and gave the project a second chance.

Ruthie also suggested creating surroundings for the vase, to ‘give it a place to be’. So I started building my scene. I started with the inside of that same envelope, which had a striped pattern. I gave it a thin coat of a really pale lavender so it would fade into the background.

It took a few days to draw, cut, and watercolor the flowers, long stemmed yellow and orange daisies. To go with that bright yellow, I found an abstract blue page out of an art magazine for the billowing curtains. It was starting to look like a picture.

I remembered that Shirley, from the ZOOM group, had used blue paper to make the water in her vase. I wanted mine to be transparent, so I mixed some aquamarine acrylic paint with some glue and painted it on the plastic. It stuck!

Then I used the same color for the sky through the window, a soft yellow paper made the window frame, and graph paper made a nice tablecloth.

I now had all the pieces for my picture, but I wasn’t ready to glue anything down yet, because I didn’t like where they were. It felt static, even with the curtains billowing in the wind. So I walked away and thought about it overnight.

The next day I moved the window a bit to the right and the vase a bit to the left, loved it, and glued it down. Finally, I glued the stems into the vase, but left the flowers loose, so they can flop a bit.

Another Ruthie Inman inspiration, all done!

Love,

Grandma Judy

More Mixing of Media

Dear Liza,

Learning and doing new things is a wonderful way to stay young. Doing the Art Journal challenge with Ruth Inman every week is making me be a better artist, too.

This week I decided to use the mixed media items (address labels, box tops, and can labels) to make a picture that wasn’t about the collage. Let me explain.

I have usually made collages where the paper itself is the feature. The Tootsie Roll wrappers in my bouquet, though bright and fun, never looked like anything other than what they were.

My new challenge was to make a real picture using collage bits. Since I am getting better at faces (by practicing a lot), I decided to draw a face with watercolor pencils, then build the environment with collage.

Naked face and some tentative background…

Once I got the basic proportions in, I built my cityscape background from junk mail. I made them very vertical so they looked like tall buildings. Auntie Bridgett showed me how to make the perspective.

Then came the hard part, making the face. Auntie Bridgett suggested making my character monochromatic, or all one color. I chose blue.

The more I drew, the more I liked it. Shading cheekbones and eye sockets is something that definitely takes practice! Putting in sky and what I thought was a street made it more ‘real’.

He needed a face, so I made eyes out of box tops and junk mail, with eyebrows from address labels, and lips, mustache and goatee from security envelopes.

His hair is made from address labels, with a little black acrylic sponged on to make it more uniform in color. I kept liking it, so I put some details in the background with an Elegant Writer and a few clouds to give perspective.

Looking again, I realized the ‘street’ really looked like an overcoat, so I put in some lapels. And voila! I call him Georges, because he looks French, stylish, and a bit paranoid. I hope when you see this, you will try making a collage picture, too!

Love,

Grandma Judy