collage cards

One of my visual activities during my studio residency at Signal Arts Centre was replenishing my supply of collage cards, which are always handy to have around for those special occasions or short correspondences. So when packing items to bring down to the studio, I made sure to include a supply of card stock, pva glue, glue stick and a folder full coloured paper scraps and bits of paper that I thought I would make use of. 

The first group of cards were simply based on a recent painting from the Memory Is My Homeland series. Florence Road: Butterfly Wall can be seen here and information on both the work for Memory Is My Homeland and the past four years of autumn residencies at Signal Arts Centre can be easily searched for on this blog.

As is my usual practice, I make several collage cards at a time with variations on a theme. The same but different!

Last summer I did a major clearout of books and magazines. I have been a subscriber to Aramco World for at least 20 years now (it is similar to National Geographic but with a focus on the promotion of understanding between Western and Muslim cultures). Before putting the magazines in the bin to be recycled, however, I meticulously went through each issue in order to rescue recipes (included in most issues) and colour images for later use. Some of these images made excellent background patterns for collage cards.

Here are a number of floral cards I made. At home my xmas cactus was blooming so I had done a few sketches in preparation for collages. The iris and wild rose are meaningful stand-bys for me.

I created another group of collage cards with the chimneys and wires motif that I haven't fully explored in my work.

Of course Fort Carré found it's way into the new collage cards - with the studio feeling positively wintry some days I can't help but reminisce with myself about the south of France! I haven't been to Antibes since 2018...

The last collage cards I made at the Signal studio are based on a photo I took of a rainbow and tree outside my house.

making zines!

I follow Austin Kleon on Instagram and he has been posting loads of little zines during the lockdown. He normally makes these as loving notes to include in his young son's lunchbox. Recently he has included little videos showing how he makes the zines. You can see his instructions here. Easy enough, with no glue and not even a scissors to cut the part that needs to be cut (just carefully tear along a crease) though a bone folder is an invaluable tool. I tried some zines myself, using images of maps from an Aramco World calendar that I didn't just want to bin - the maps are too interesting!

Although using a standard size (letter or A3 page) allows for easy reproduction of a zine, I wondered how the method would translate to larger and heavier pieces of paper. I decided to find out and pulled out some paper samples to turn into large zines.

The heavy pages are definitely harder to fold than the photocopy or typing paper... First fold in half.

Then fold in half again.

The third folding in half is even a challenge for the bone folder and the edges do not stay uniform.

Unfold back to the first folding so that centre creases are visible. The crease on the lower fold (if you consider that the upper part is open, as is obvious here with one of the calendar page zines).

With the heavier papers I took out my matte knife as I knew some cutting would be necessary, rather than simple tearing.

Unfold the whole page and the cuts are in the centre. It is easy to unfold and this is very useful if you are going to photocopy your finished zine. I was also curious about more formats for zines, again made from 1 initial standard sheet of paper that is easily reproducable, and found several youtube videos for making an 8 page and a 14 page zine, courtesy of autumnthing.

Pick the page up and push the ends together so that a central square is automatically formed.

Continued pushing will bring the "squared" pages together and voilà, your zine is ready to become whatever you want! With heavy paper you may need to crease the folds again with the bone folder.