Continuing to Develop the Collage Technique

I've made two more collages, continuing to work with the method I'm developing that begins with copyright free photos.  I'm working on this method to teach a collage workshop with very simple accessible techniques.  But also, I'm enjoying making these as exercises in creativity.

This one with the cat I call "The Poet's Dream."

Here's a photo of what it looked like with only the collage phase done.  I almost gave up on it at this point.  The cat seemed to disappear and the edge between the gray and white parts was just too harsh.  I wasn't at all sure that I could solve these problems with just colored pencil and I didn't want to use any paint because that would make the technique more difficult for beginning students.

But I just kept working away at it and eventually it came together.  I used a couple of different techniques to soften the gray/white edges, all centered around darkening the white and lightening the gray.

The there was quite a bit of work to bring out the cat.  I added a bit more collage - all small bits - and in the end I think it works well.



I call this one "The Night of Magic."  I had the vision of adding all the swirls around the antlers from the beginning, but it took a bit of work to get to the place where I could add them.

Here's what it looked like after the collage layer.  As you can see, there was a lot of colored pencil work, particularly darkening the sky and bringing out the deer.  It was all fun, but the best part was those swirls.  By the way, I really like how opaque the white pencil is.  I used Prismacolor.