Finding Your Creative Voice through Collage

Create Your Self Portrait Using Every-Day Objects.

“Dear student, Let us recap some of what we have gone through in the course and understand the logic behind it. We started with me telling you the journey of discovery of my own language. The reason for me telling you that story was to make the point that in order to develop our own way to do something and in order to be creative in general, we need to give ourselves time and space to allow the possibility of being confused and even lost. Next I showed you one method of creation that allows for this to happen. We began to ‘play’ creating dimensional collages, and lowered our innate anxiety about being in the ‘artistic space’. We experienced tricks that help us become more creative: trial and error, searching for good accidents, creating limitations, being flexible and distilling meaning. Next we had a short study of the face, looking at various caricature artists, learning about visual hierarchies, and exploring both facial expressions and factors that determine likeness. All that study led us to end the course by creating a dimensional portrait. It is important to understand that the aim of this course is not to teach you to make collages or even how to make portraits, but to teach some methods of thinking that can help you push further your creative side and perhaps even help you know yourself a bit better. This can be helpful whether you work in any other artistic medium if you’re an artist, in your classroom if you are an educator and perhaps even in your own life. I invite you to treat your life as a ‘collage’. This is a perfect lead to your final project which is to create your own Collage Self Portrait. In other words: What are YOU made of? Remember the objects you gathered in Task 3 of Unit 1? You chose objects that represented: 1- something in yourself that gives you pride 2- a challenge you have 3- something that tells about your family or your community Now it is time to revisit them. By now I am sure that you have many more objects and possibilities around so why don’t you add other objects that perhaps talk about your traits, your dreams, your challenges, memories of the past, dreams for the future, places where humor appears in your life, etc. At this point don’t be judgmental with your choices. Collect anything that triggers an idea or an emotion in you. Bring to the table also objects or forms that look visually attractive to you. Again with no judgement. At this point you are creating for yourself a bank of ideas and of means of conveying them. Now, your task, as we have been doing throughout the course will be to slowly create your own order, edit yourself and find your own way of telling your story by creating a self portrait. It does not have to be the ultimate story. It is not the only time in your life in which you will create a self portrait. Do not feel pressure to make it look exactly like you. It doesn’t have to. It doesn’t even have to be a face. This is not an exercise in creating a likeness but in dealing with the process of individual creation and communication. Not all the objects that you use must have a deep meaning, some might help you communicate visually and some perhaps add visual pleasure. But remember to understand what is more important to communicate in your piece and let that guide the the visual hierarchy of the piece. All elements in your piece should work to help and enhance your communication. You can add color shapes in any way you want, by adding color paper, painting, or using fabric. Once you are done, glue everything with a hot glue gun. Photograph it and upload it to the course board. ”

Partial transcription of the video

“FINAL PROJECT In this video I would like to do a recap of what we've seen in the course and the reason for every step that we took together. I began by presenting myself and the work that I have done during my career. Then I told you the story of my journey of self discovery with the purpose of conveying the idea that the path was not always that easy, but it gave me the chance to explore and find my own voice. Then we explored the collage technique, which is a very easy way of creating art that allows anyone to explore our surroundings and ourselves. We spoke about the importance of seeing...”

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Course summary for: Finding Your Creative Voice through Collage

• Level: Beginner
• 100% positive reviews (97)
• 1908 students
• 4 units
• 16 lessons (1h 40m)
• 2 downloads

• Category

  Craft, Illustration

• Areas

  Arts & Crafts, Collage, Creating with Kids