Working with Magazine Pages

Inspired by the work of Derek Gores, I decided to make a glued collage with magazine pages. I’ve done this before on a small scale. This time I moved up to a whopping 16 x 20.

This was my inspiration photo. It’s a combination of 3 photos which I manipulated and merged on my computer. Can you guess why I chose blue-green as the background (fabric) color? (Think near-complementary colors.)

I drew my design directly onto a wrapped canvas and got to work.

I was working with friends and we used undiluted matte medium just the way you would with decoupage. You remember that from the seventies right? Glue underneath and more glue on top.

As you might imagine, the largish pieces and the lack of accuracy needed made the background go pretty quickly.

But, hmm, I had a problem. The shadows seemed to almost disappear. Clearly, I’d need to make them darker. More paper and more glue!

That’s better.

I began working on the cherries in earnest and, as you can imagine, I soon had little bits of colored paper going in all directions. Finding papers was pretty fun, though.

The right cherry completed.

LOTS more tiny bits of paper as I worked on the other two.

I was getting there, but I was also getting rather tired of dealing with little fiddly pieces of paper. I decided that perfection was not needed and started to work more loosely. What a relief! (I should have done this from the get-go.)

Soon, I’ll show you the finished collage and also give you a rundown of the pros and cons, as I see them, of fabric collage versus paper collage.

Ellen Lindner
P.S. See some of my earlier magazine page collages: ONE,