Exercise: Low-relief collage using fabric
Create a set of three small images in the form of low-relief collages.
I sketched out a few ideas on paper first. Looking at how I might use different coloured fabric together as well as different textures. Also, how I would incorporate stitched and pen-drawn lines.
Due to how long I’d taken to complete previous assignment, I decided to keep things as simple and abstract as possible. After choosing a couple of different types of fabric to work on, I went with a shiny brown background and cut out a variety of material and paper and set about creating small collages.
The strong background colour seemed to work well with contrasting coloured and textured fabric and cotton. I cut three similarly sized pieces out of some of my son’s old red chino trousers. From here I cut up different pieces of fabric and colourful paper and tried different compositions on the three pieces.
I chose a strongly contrasting colour as the first layer of the collage on all three pieces to bring them some unity, but placing the blue rectangles differently on each piece to begin them all distinctively. Keeping in mind the idea that they are all different but part of a set, I slowly tried different compositions as I went along and stitched or glued pieces in place when I was happy.
Once I was happy with how I’d place all the different components of the collage, I glued and stitched everything down and took a step back to think about how to complete each composition.
I looked at the shapes of the collage pieces and stitched lines, and used pen to draw echoed lines onto the pieces. I then put them together differently and thought about anything else I could add to finish the collages.
Adding a few more pen marks, I decided to leave them as they are. I can’t decide whether I like them or not, I would probably add sheer fabric over the collages in places if I had given myself more time to work on them. My favourite part is the red and blue seam section intersecting the centre of the bottom collage, contrasting and flipping the colours on top of each other. I’ve recreated the layered shapes I’d drawn on paper and tried out in my test pieces, but the spaces between some of the shapes maybe would have worked better I’d connected them in some way either with stitching or pen marks. I wanted coloured to contrast and build up and I think that’s been achieved to a certain extent. The visual impact of the collage pieces is fairly impressive, again though I think I could improve upon the pieces if I had more time. I’m not sure the pen marks have added much to the compositions, except where I’ve drawn marks replicating stitching across the bottom collage.
Ruth Beech - Mindful Movement, Meditation and Art 