Collage Demo with Judy Verhoeven

hi i'm judy verhoeven and i'm a paper collage artist i thought i'd show you around my studio before um we start the demo video that's my work table back there and gonna roll us right around so you can see my studio this is the pretty part where all the art gets hung and one of my studio mates back there zoe um that's it so let's get started on the demo video the first part of my process is to choose paper i use recycled paper and then i paint it with acrylic paint once the paper is painted i divide it up by color and i have a big flat file and i store the paper individually into the colors and then uh you know depending on what color i need i go through my flat file and if i find what i need i use it and if not i paint more this particular piece of paper in this file in my gray file was one i used on the piece i'm going to be demonstrating golden heavy gel matte medium is what i use for my glue it's very thick it's heavy body so when i buy it i dilute it with water and it's probably about a one to one ratio and i mix it up it ends up about the consistency of pancake batter i work on wooden panels that my husband builds for me and the beginning of the process is taking papers that i've chosen for the background and applying them to the panel i like to work wet on wet which means i put the gel medium glue onto the panel first and um the same gel medium is painted on the back of my piece of paper and then i put the paper down wet on wet down and adhere it to the panel and i make sure i press firmly on the whole thing to get all the air bubbles out and make sure the paper doesn't have any gaps in it and on this piece i wanted all of the background papers to be significant or just colorful in some way um including open studios catalog and um a bag from a luminary from my front porch i knew i was going to want to i was eventually going to be painting over the entire background so after everything was dry i mixed up some light blue paint with gel medium to make it somewhat translucent and i painted over the entire background panel once that was done i let it dry and then i changed the orientation a little bit so it's rotated in this picture and now it's time for me to start to cut out and adhere the limbs of my tree and remember that piece of paper from the beginning that's the paper i used for the limbs on the tree and i locate them on the board so i know about where i want to glue them and then i start gluing them down this is sped up quite a bit and the reason i did that is because this actually takes a long time and you would get way bored watching this video if um if we did it in real time so throughout the video there there will be times when things are sped up a lot so this is just showing putting down the um first layer of my trees a neat thing about working wet on wet is if i put something down and i want to scooch it over a little bit um because it's it's still wet under there i'm able to move it around some and that's handy like in this piece i didn't want to cover up certain lettering in the background so it's nice to be able to move things in case it was covering something that i wanted to show then once i was finished with that i cut out a bunch of leaves from my green papers and placed them about where i wanted to glue them and then just start gluing them down and again i glue things down wet on wet so i put the glue on the panel and also put the glue on the back of the piece of paper i'm gonna adhere and then i plop it down and you can tell i move things around just to eyeball it and decide where i want it how i want it to look i didn't like that so i decided to cover it over now you can see i'm adhering these little strips of limbs and kind of the center of the leaf those are the details that pretty easy to put down um and they make it look more realistic i guess by the time i'm done i've put a lot of coats of the gel medium on it and then once i was finished with the background i was ready to start cutting out the pieces for the bird and i had already cut out um a full silhouette of the bird and this is the start of some of the details that will go on top of the bird and again this is sped up so if you think i'm like speed cutter i'm really not this fast and so you can see that i've already cut a few pieces and you start to see how i'm doing some lighter shades of yellow and some darker shades of yellow for the body of the wren most of that will be covered up i just want to get get a background put down so that i can work on top of that like this this is the background for the tail and i'm just getting that down there before i put the detail on i'm going to put the body of the bird again wet on wet that way i can um move it around after i've placed it just to get it in the right position i don't know if you can see it but there's a a very faint line that shows me exactly where i want to put the bird shape down and i use those guides so that when it's time for me to adhere things it's going where i want it to go because i've already thought about that and planned it and now i'm just gonna start building um the shading and the details on my wrench these pieces i've already cut out i didn't show you cutting out each of each of these in a few minutes you will see one piece and i'll explain how i cut it out so this is how i cut out individual pieces the part that has the pencil mark on top that was created on tracing paper and then i tape the tracing paper pattern to my piece of painted paper and i cut it out and when i finish cutting this out this shape is going to be glued onto the bird and again this is sped up so i i don't cut this fast you can also tell i like details i am a product of my parents they're both very um detail-oriented my mom was especially detail-oriented i look at my hands doing this and i see her hands it makes me so happy okay um there it is finished and it along with all the other pieces are going to be adhered to the bird and you can see how layer upon layer upon layer eventually all these bits of paper turn into a finished piece and there's the piece you saw me cut out so now you can see where it's going to end up going the glue that i'm using the gel medium it is um it looks white in the bucket but it dries clear so i know that on this video there's a glare um that's just because it's wet once everything's dry you can't see any of the gel medium and i use a matte gel so that it doesn't dry shiny so now i'm working on um the details and these are pieces of painted paper that i've cut out and very specific shapes and now i'm adhering them on to the piece this takes a whole lot longer as you may guess so this is real time i'm putting these three little highlight pieces on i just wanted that to be behind because that's the far side claw so i gave it a little snip this one i just decided was too tall i ended up cutting it again when i work wet on wet i can lift it up and do things like that self incorrect throughout the whole thing and surprisingly paper is stronger than you think so i'm able to work it lift it up and put it back down i like to get the eye done because now suddenly i'm working on this creature that's looking at me and i don't know kind of gives it a soul so i thought i'd show you the whole process of putting the eye together there are a lot of layers in in an eye i use regular size scissors but they're not fabric scissors because paper wreaks havoc on scissors and you wouldn't want to screw up your good fabric scissors cutting cutting out paper putting in little snips of thin um thin cut pieces of paper is perfect for creating feather and fur and if you've ever done eyes it's a rare eye that doesn't have that little highlight hot spot on it it makes an eye look very alive these details are what create that feathery texture so there the eye is finished with all of the other little snippets i put on to it and now i'm going through the open studios catalog because i wanted to incorporate images from that catalog in this piece specifically so that's what i'm doing i'm just cutting some different things out and i'm going to glue them on there that to me is one of the fun and unique things about collage is including words images poems song lyrics um all kind of things that give it significance for you so this is the name of an artist who um tragically died in an accident last year and especially this time of year i think about him and his family and i wanted to put his name in this piece and now i'm just cutting little bits of papers that i'm gonna that i put on the beak and um that ear from that dog picture was perfect for that whole thing i don't know what it's called on the bird's beak that's how it ended up looking you may notice that the bird's body is completely filled in as well as the bird's claws and that's because i forgot to turn the camera on when i was gluing all of that down so you don't get to see that and that's it i hope you enjoyed it thanks

Channel: Greenville Open Studios

Views: 23,989

Rating: 4.9683452 out of 5

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Id: M0Q8q5laHS8

Length: 21min 12sec (1272 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 06 2020