Heather Thomas

Contemporary Collage Session 1: An Introduction to Collage

Heather Thomas
Duration:   7  mins

Description

In this first session, Heather shows several examples of collaged art quilts. She uses those quilts to introduce the ideas of positive and negative space, motifs and focal points, color and texture and more. She’ll also help you begin to understand the techniques of layering, working with iron-on adhesives and augmenting a composition with free motion quilting.

Share tips, start a discussion or ask other students a question. If you have a question for the instructor, please click here.

Make a comment:
characters remaining

No Responses to “Contemporary Collage Session 1: An Introduction to Collage”

No Comments

Each time we begin a new project, whether it's a bed quilt or an art quilt, we have to choose what techniques we're going to use. How we're going to go about building this piece that we're doing. Because I like to do things kind of off the cuff, one of my favorite techniques is to collage. And a lot of us are familiar with that word, but we think about it with paper. But I like to collage with fabric.

The reason I like it so much is because I'm not piecing at all. I'm simply layering fabrics on top of each other. And that gives me the option of changing my mind moving things around and altering my design as I go. So the word collage is a French term and it is basically saying "we're going to glue." Collage means to glue. In fabric, we're generally using an iron-on adhesive to do that gluing.

And that's what we're going to be doing in this class, is learning what iron-on adhesives to use and how to go about doing this whole collage idea, and making a piece that's very visually appealing. Collages can get kind of crafty if you're not careful. Keeping them to a level of art or I guess respectability, you could say, is kind of tough. And so we have to learn a lot about composition. So in this class we're gonna learned to understand fabric choices and how important they are, as well as the techniques that we're going to be using to put all of our fabrics down, and the stitching that we're going to be using to bring it all together.

These are a couple of small collages and they'll help you understand the kind of the basic setup for a collage. We began with a base and that base can be batting or it can be a backing fabric, in this case it's batting. It's this black portion here. And then we have sort of a background for this one because we're using focal points. Not all collages will have a focal point, but in this case, our focal point was this fabric that had this wonderful flower stitched on it.

Our background is a mix of greens. They're are yellow-greens, they're very similar in color. Slight differences in tone and in value, but very slight. And slight differences in texture. When you actually feel this you can feel that some are silk, some are cotton, some are a rougher silk.

But they are simply ripped, place down, and then layers are put on top of them. And everything is glued, and then they're stitched. This collage is a little bit more busy and it also has a focal point, but it's got even more layers. It started with batting also but it was a dye painted batting. So the batting was colored a color that went along with the fabrics.

It had one main fabric as the base, another fabric laid on top of that, and the decorative fabric started going down. Beginning with this green strip that's underneath, these orange strips that are underneath the top most, more green, some embellishments such as in this case, this is a cheesecloth. And then in the stitching even more fabric was put down in embellishment, but it's one layer on top of another layer, on top of another layer with no piecing. This one almost looks like it's pieced, and it's much, much simpler. Neutral strips.

So I ripped the strips rather than chunks, and I laid them out sort of in a piecing order, almost like a rail fence. So here we've got rows, and rows, and rows, and rows. However, they're not pieced, they're simply overlapped, glued in place with an iron-on adhesive. A circle was then laid down, stitching was done, and then it was topped with a print. Basically a stamp on top.

And this is my favorite of this small group. I like it because of the color. Again on this one, we have a backing fabric, which is this black that's way back here. It's sitting on top of a light blue batting, again, a dye painted batting. The reason I did this is I really wanted this black sort of frame around these bright colors.

And then that light blue frames the black. That allows those colors to really jump off the surface. So here we have just about every color there is, small pieces overlapping, then on top of that, we have the squares first, on top of that we have some wonderful long linear pieces added. And then on top of that, we have quilting, and then on top of that, we have another style of quilting that's adding focal points. So this is a much more complex collage.

And finally we have this one, which I just think is a stunning piece. Beautiful, beautiful, neutral colors. A gorgeous selection of fabric. When it comes to collage the fabric is the thing. We're not doing any fancy piecing and we want to choose fabrics that are gonna really kind of pack a wallop.

Here our fabrics kind of look like dark smoky skies. And we have a nice array of visual textures as well as tactile textures from embroidered cottons all the way to velvet. So this is a beautiful silk velvet. More texture was added with the stitching. But let's look at the actual composition of the layering.

And you can see that our pieces in the background are much bigger than the pieces in the previous pieces. That's because the piece itself is a lot bigger. This is called the design field and it's a much bigger design field. And so our pieces are larger also. I simply begun by ripping up the fabrics and started laying them down.

And as I laid them down I was looking for contrast, contrast of value, contrast of color between the grays and the tans, contrast a visual texture, and of tactile texture. Once I was pleased with the negative space or the background, then I laid in the pieces that were going to be focal points. Focal point is that which draws the eye of the viewer. And these pieces of velvet are the focal points, mainly because they're darker than everything else. They're what brings the eye there and then you see what's around them afterwards.

So the composition is very simple, but it's one that brings the viewer to the piece and helps the viewer stay with a piece for a while. A while for me is about five seconds. Somebody looks at my artwork for five seconds, I'm a happy person. It doesn't sound like very long, but it really is. So a collage is something that is layered rather than pieced.

We use an iron-on adhesive or some sort of quote-unquote glue to hold things in place until we do the quilting. And what this gives us is absolute total freedom.

Get exclusive premium content! Sign up for a membership now!