Up: [[Visual Arts]] Created: 2025-09-09 > [!user] 5 classes in the free Collage Kickstarter course by [Catherine Rains](https://catherinerains.com) #### First Class — Find Supplies - any kind of papers at all, variety of them, include old book pages. I want to find some old dictionaries, even in different languages so there’s no distraction in trying to read the words of the finished collage - mark makers of all kinds — any household items with texture (soap dishes, trivets, glasses…), lots of round things of varying sizes (jar lids for example), a fork, a comb… - choose colour palette. Two colours only in either cool palette (blues, greens) or warm palette (red, orange, yellow, pink) or two primaries (red, blue, yellow) plus white, black, gold, and silver #### Second Class — Make Papers - Make lots and lots of papers. Need some that are predominantly light value of chosen colours, some that are medium value, and some that are dark. - Layer the papers with marks until you get to a paper you love. - Catherine sprays a lot of water on a painted paper to get the paint to move and she takes another sheet and blots it off, creating a second collage piece. She uses so much water that she leaves her papers to dry on a shower curtain. #### Third Class — Tissue Paper - Need white tissue paper (dollar store variety is fine) and one or more favourite stencils that have fairly small holes. Also a stencil with letters or numbers. Catherine sells a four pack of small hole stencils she has made through Joggle. They were out of stock when I looked, but I do have some I quite like. - Use any of light molding paste, molding paste, joint compound or stucco to spread over the stencil, making sure to get it in the holes. - Make tissue paper pieces also with the stencils using black paint and again, on a new one, gold paint. When using paint with a stencil, especially with tissue paper, you want our brush to be as dry as possible so the paint doesn’t glob. - Stencils can be cleaned off by applying Murphy’s Oil, letting it sit for about 15 minutes and then the stencil will wipe clean with a damp sponge. #### Fourth Class — Circles - Circles are tremendously effective in collage work. - Use a chip brush (cheap brush with varying length of bristles) to paint freehand black circles, circles of palette colours. It looks particularly good to have a black circle and then another circle in same space that’s one of your colours so that the two merge. - Use jar lids to make other sizes of circles. Do some on book pages along with other marks. Water and blotting on some. Really, this is the same as class two, it’s just focused on circles. #### Fifth Class — Assembling the Collages - Take the stacks of collage pages you’ve made and go through them one at a time asking yourself only, “Do I love this?” Keep the ones you do, set the others aside. - Of the papers you love, sort into values-based piles — light, medium, dark. Then spread them out a bit on your worktable so you have easy access to them. - Catherine lights a candle at this point, takes some deep breaths, and invites a higher power to guide her. For each paper she imagines the collages she is about to create as a sacred expression of who she is. - Make a six-box, four-box, twelve-box, whatever size you want to work with, grid on a sheet. Catherine gave the useful tip of tracing around a 3x3 post it note to make a six box grid. I did that and it worked well, but I should have had a couple of lines to make sure my rows were level. I also learned that the extension lines I drew in to make for easier cutting can’t be erased once they’re covered in rogue gel. If I had the boxes properly lined up, I could have used the box above or below as a guide for easier cutting. There are three rules in assembling. They are all rules of composition to support as much contrast as possible: 1. Only place 3-4 pieces of collage paper in each box. 2. Each piece in a box needs to be a different size from the others in that box. 3. Different values or colours need to be next to each other. - Tear the paper or use a ruler and a xacto knife to cut. - Put down with either gel or matte medium. - At the end, bring in a consistent element across the entire series (that’s what makes it look like a series). Catherine had us using our favourite tissue paper stencil piece that had been done with molding paste. She had a second set of six collages (which I didn’t make) and for each of them, the consistent element was bits of text from magazines. There’s no need to have the words be readable, they can be segments of words, because they are just a consistent element not the focal point of the collage. ![[Catherine Rains (collage).webp]]