Class 5— September 2 — Class Collage

You’ll receive a mystery photograph to paint today. Come prepared to paint a 5x7” painting whether on paper or canvas. At the end of the day we’ll assemble our collage of paintings to reveal what we’ve painted.

Hi gang,

This class should be a little lighthearted fun, so put down what you’re working on and come play with us! I have a challenge to give you. In class I’ll hand you a photograph, or should I say a 5x7” part of one photograph, which you can paint in class. Did I mention that the photo is not in color? Oh yeah, you need to make it your own. The fun and challenging part of it is that your little painting needs to respect the values you see in the photo, and catch the divisions of space fairly accurately, so when we assemble them together it makes one whole painting that fits together.

Let me show you an example of one the class did several years ago, which we printed and used as an invitation to one of our class shows. It really was a fun experiment and made a surprisingly successful collage.

Class Collage 2005

We all know one another’s work well enough that I bet you can look at it and identify who painted which section, even though this was done in 2005! The scale of the images was smaller here, since we had more artists taking part, and of course these are all in pastel. You can use any medium you prefer this week. You can see part of the photograph with the gridlines showing each section tacked below the painting. No one saw the entire image until we had finished the individual paintings. (And this is a familiar place to Albuquerqueans—our beloved Sandia Peak.)

So come prepared to take up the challenge and play along this week. Bring along your increased scale paintings from last week to share in class, whether you’re completely finished or not. I’d love to know what you thought of the exercise.

I hope you enjoy this class!

Keep going, gang,
Deborah