Cut & Paste: Collage Night with The Designer Friends!
What do you get when you combine four designers, an overabundance of inspiration magazines, and non-toxic glue?
That’s right: Collage Night!
In this here town, we take our collage-makin' seriously.
In a world where most of our design happens in photoshop, it’s nice to get the team together for a good, relaxing night of cut & paste: old fashioned style.
On a wild image safari.
Though useful skills in their own right, digital image-building makes it way too easy to think about layers, textures, cropping, and opacity. If something doesn’t work, hide it. Or delete it. Or drop the opacity and make it a texture. The possibilities are endless, and therein lies the chance to be paralyzed: not just paralyzed by opportunity, but paralyzing our ability to grow artistically to meet opportunity.
Collage shares many of the same characteristics – if you don’t like it, paste over it, or cut it out – except the materiality of collage forces you to think on your feet. Instead of searching free stock images for just the right thing, you’re forced to improvise and use what you have on hand. Physically manipulating paper gives you a new appreciation for how to construct images, and having to manually create a composition makes you start thinking about layout in ways that never would have happened if you hadn’t had to figure out how to deal with an image that just can’t be stretched, skewed, or transformed.
makin' and doin'
Rather than getting caught up in the details, however, collage leads you to discover what really matters in an image and what doesn’t stand out quite as much as you think it does. It forces you to look at color, unity, and to think of shape as a leading factor in directing the eye. Basically, if digital image-building can overwhelm with options, paper collage brings it back to basics: the basics of design, that is.
Hugo gets a knife.
Line, Space, Texture, Color, Form, Shape, Value: the composition of these elements in collage is limited only by your patience, your imagination, and the amount of the glue you have on hand. Once you manage to stop reading articles and starting viewing paper as possibilities, the task becomes an intimate and critical inspection of the work you intend to make.
Speaking of intimate, Jeena drops in to help us reach our daily dose of nude old men.
Is collage cheating? Some argue yes: that using other people’s images and pasting them together seems shallow. But for our purposes – to think outside of our normal creation cycle – appropriating pre-established imagery took away some of the creative pressure that we’re under as designers and illustrators to make the perfect image from scratch. Collage instead becomes about the making, the rethinking, the opening of the mind: even if we were using someone else’s base, the image challenges us to use the imagination to make it into something other than what we generally visually perceive it being or doing. When you work with someone else’s image, you really have to make artistic choices to make it your own.
The only problem with working physical is that it tends to get a littttttle crowded....
Additionally, because you’re limited to what’s available and to what you’ve already done, collage forces you to be critical before you start working as well as during the making process. Rather than jumping in and relying on Ctrl-Z to rectify a situation, you have to plan ahead. And while no picture ever looks exactly like it does in your mind’s eye, when you’re engaged in the process of finding pieces and physically problem-solving, you use a part of the brain that gets a little lax when you’re used to digitally getting as close as possible. It’s flexing this part of our brain that helps make us better designers and artists: the ability to react mid-stream to unexpected obstacles or happy surprises, and incorporate them into better, stronger results. It’s the ability to evolve what our best-result looks like, and this is where long-term artistic growth happens.
Everybody chips in, even our friend Hans here.
And finally, the best thing about collage night wasn’t just that it was low-stress, but that it was a community-driven effort. Collage is a open-ended process, and that’s what makes it so useful and fun for a wide variety of skill levels and talents: when Hugo invited us over, each person who came brought a different feel, a different visual sense and purpose, and a new way of constructing image. Seeing how other people approaching image-building influences each of our processes and changes how we decide to work.
Best of all, working together and learning together bonded us (if you’ll excuse the glue pun), and we all came home with something silly and new as a result.
C: Stephen!
M: Corey!
Y: Hugo!
and K!
So Nashville…What are you making today?