I would like to teach workshops on collage but the technique I usually use depends on drawing and painting. Since so many people believe that they can't draw, I've been working on techniques that don't require drawing but do include nice animal images.
I decided to start with photographs, so I took a few photos of my chicken, Maisie, and my sister's dog, Sunny. I loaded the photos onto my laptop then used an on-line free, minimal, but very useful version of Photoshop, www.photoshop.com/tools to lighten the exposure as much as possible and dramatically increase the saturation. I printed the image on my ink jet printer then sprayed it with workable fixatif to set the ink and allow me to use it in collage.
The first phase of the piece was constructing the collage background, including the image of Maisie that I ripped from the sheet I printed her on. In this photo, I've also begun a bit of the colored pencil work.
The longest part of the process was go build up Maisie's image with colored pencil. I left the highly saturated parts of Maisie's plumage as it was from the manipulated photo for the highlights. Most of my colored pencil work was on the darker parts of the plumage as well as the details of the face. So, essentially what I did was to reduce the original photo to light saturated colors, then work back up with colored pencil to achieve something close to, but more dramatic and colorful than, the original photo as I snapped it.
As always, for me, the most fun parts are towards the end when I add decorative elements. So I drew in some bugs and added colored pencil motifs in the background.
Then I continued until I probably had done too much. Finally, I couldn't resist getting out my alphabet stamps and adding some text "these bugs are so annoying - I think I will eat them."
Here's the one I did of Sunny.
I think this technique would work for people who aren't comfortable with drawing or painting. It just involves collage with paper bits and colored pencil work.
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