Bird Mixed Media Collage

I wanted to make a 5x7 inch collage that I’d then cut into four artist trading cards. This is what I made last night. For some “me time” I declared the after dinner time as art making time. While this went on my husband ran an errand with my sons and then the children played a game with each other while I cleaned up. It was then bedtime and after a few minutes of reading aloud the kids went to bed. Normally we watch one TV show together as a family but the kids had a punishment yesterday of no television that day, so that actually gave me more time than I’d normally have, a little window of more time to make art.

I began with a recycled cereal box for a sturdy base.

I covered the brown cardboard side with a piece of white paper with a yellow floral pattern on it.

I then used a technique that someone shared on a chat list over a year ago. It started with first using waxed paper (the kind you wrap food in, or that people used to use to do so), as a surface covering while working on other art projects. In the past I had painted a bunch of backgrounds for ATCs with acrylic paints and with homemade acrylic glazes. I also had used some rubber stamps with acrylic paint and acrylic glazes and to clean them off I stamped them onto this waxed paper. One of these stamps says “believe”, you can see that clearly in the collage. When the project was done I then let the waxed paper dry and saved it for use in a later collage.

I took the waxed paper with random paint and glaze on them and tore them to shreds. Using Golden Acrylic Gel Medium Soft Gel Matte, I adhered them to the background. They looked translucent and interesting and covered up most of the floral paper in the background.

I adhered a piece of fiber that another mail artist sent me to the collage.

I added an image of a flower that someone sent me; it is a computer printout of a flower printed onto a transparent plastic sheet (why does the right name for that product escape me now?).

Using sequin waste again sent to me by a mail artist, I added blue and white chalk rubber stamp ink.

Before I set it with a heat gun I added a bird rubber stamp (stamp credit Martha Stewart crafts at Michael's Craft Shop) and used blue embossing powder for the bird. I accidentally let the powder go onto the not-yet set white chalk ink so that was a mistake. I then melted the embossing powder of the blue colored bird. I then added two more bird images using white embossing powder.

Lastly there was an empty area that needed something. Using a garden seed catalog image of purple flowers, I made a packing tape transfer and adhered it to the collage. I chose to do a packing tape transfer as the rest of the collage was absent of typical collage of the image on white or other colored paper. I felt the image was too detailed to cut it out around the edges of the flowers and leaves. I felt the colored background was so pretty that to have this be a packing tape transfer that would let the background show around the edges of the flowers would be perfect.

After scanning this collage I cut it into four ATCs.

I used these ATCs for an “Anything Goes” swap on Swap-bot.

I really loved the look of the collaged waxed paper with the paint and glaze on it. I should change from using old newspapers as my standard table surface protector to using the waxed paper as I would love to have more of it to use in future collages.

Since the collage used waxed paper, paper, fiber, images on plastic, paint, glaze and ink this is technically a mixed-media collage.

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