Friday, December 8, 2017

Collage Mixed-Media Cityscapes



The kids and I loved doing this project. First of all, I love combining collage with painting and drawing, and I love big bustling cities. Secondly, this project was an opportunity for my students to visually communicate where they, or their families, comes from. Always big points for personalizing art. The New York artist, Elizabeth Rosen, was the inspired for this project. See her work here.

Related image
Elizabeth Rosen
Objectives were: creating a layered cityscape using various collage and book papers; overlapping buildings; variety in text, color and shape; balance and harmony; perspective (smaller and higher in back, bigger and lower at bottom); and creating depth with charcoal sticks, which we smudged with our fingers. We added personalized symbols which represent our home city of choice. 

We began by painting our sky in an opaque color. We only painted half way down, because we knew that our collage papers would cover the bottom up to middle portion (saving on time and paint is always good!) 
We then cut out various collage papers in simplified building shapes and were mindful of varying our shapes and sizes of our building, as well as choosing papers with different fonts, coloration and design, so as to achieve a well balanced and dynamic cityscape.
We arranged and then glued, starting at the back of the city and moving down, so that those in front overlap those in back. 
We then drew symbols, signs or other indicators of the city we were representing (a shopping mall in Dubai, the City Hall in Zagreb, building top water tanks, yellow cabs and a bagel shop in New York, a church and clocktower in Prague are a few examples the kids came up with the identify their city).
We cut these out and pasted them on our buildings.

Lastly, we used soft vine charcoal to run a black line along the edge of all our buildings, and then smudged lightly with our fingers. This gives immediate and stunning depth and 3-dimension to our city.

Represented in the below collages are Berlin, Prague, Milano, NYC, Minneapolis, and an invented city. Kids 7-9.

Kids 7-9
Represent in the below collages are Dubai, Budapest, New York, an imaginary city, Zagreb and a Chinese city.
Kids 7-11