Tag Archives: Composition Camp

Composition Campers win merit badges for bravery in collage!

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The Composition Camp workshop yesterday was very, very cool – every single participant found a “right answer” to the assignment, and each answer was both unique and excellent.

First, we reviewed a slide show of composition examples like the one below based on my AB3 system  – the AB3s are Alignment, Breathing room , and Threes or thirds.:

"Three" Lyn Belisle, mixed media collage

“Three” Lyn Belisle, mixed media collage

pear

 

Then, the first assignment started with a pear – everyone got a 5×7″ substrate of watercolor paper  and a printed inkjet photograph of a green pear.

Instructions were to demonstrate great composition while building  a collage that started with identical images  – and they did!

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For their second assignment, students were encouraged to choose their own images from a National Geographic magazine, and that went just as well as the first challenge.

Both projects started with water media and images and ended with layers of textured beeswax.

Everyone shared ideas and inspired each other, but no two finished works were remotely the same. Some went completely toward abstraction and some retained the imagery. Take a look at the video – what amazing surface design and variety!

This session of Composition Camp was a huge success – yay!

Oh, and before I say goodbye for now, we have TWO Friday Freebie winners of the two Paper Pocket Purses – one winner is Quinn Jennings of Washington DC and the other  is d.price@satx.rr.com ! Y’all email me your mailing addresses, and your freebies will be on their way to you!

Thanks to everyone for subscribing to SHARDS.

Composition Camp commences with collages

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My demo collage created during Sunday’s Composition Camp workshop – 8×10″, mixed media, titled “Again?”

First workshop of the year taught by ME (yay!- I love teaching workshops) was Part One of Composition Camp. So what is Composition Camp?? It’s an intensive three-hour workshop directed toward planning and starting your artwork with strong composition bones, no matter in what medium. And it’s super easy.

I’ve developed a composition system called the AB3’s, which stands for

  • Alignment
  • Breathing Room
  • Threes and Thirds

It’s kind of like a simple kick-start for your artwork because it lets you know in advance where your main elements will be most effective. The students in yesterday’s Composition Camp: Collage workshop were given a folder with photos of a random person and a random cat along with some scraps of paper – they had to make a narrative collage using only those elements.  Everyone  took the challenge and ran with it. Take a look!

Before we began our work yesterday, we talked about painterly influences on collage imagery, particularly the works of Larry Rivers and Robert Rauschenberg, two of my favorite artists ever. Rauschenberg said that he works “in the gap between art and life,”  that he wanted to question the distinction between everyday objects and art objects. I like that!

Robert Rauschenberg, Buffalo II, 1964

Larry Rivers, French Money, 1962

It’s always good to go to the Masters for inspiration! There are two more sessions of Composition Camp to come, and there will be more in the summer and fall.