Recently I took the online class ‘Minimal Magic‘ from Laura Horn. It was a fantastic class on creating your own art papers and making small mixed media collages. It’s one of the few that I completely finished. Also, it is one of her few classes of which I actually loved the pieces that I made myself. Usually I am in awe of what she makes, her colour combinations, her techniques, and I’ll start enthusiastically on a project. But when I start creating myself I find that my own pieces are not that fantastic.
That was certainly not the case in this class. Maybe it’s because I gathered my own visuals this time: I looked at pictures I took in Venice and looked closely at what I loved in them: the particular colors of the city, the weeds, the patterns of the ironwork, the cracks in the facades. I made a little catalogue of these images and let them inspire me for these collages.
Laura showed us how to prep the papers: taking out pages from old books, painting on top of them, using tools to make textures in the paint, using a limited colour palette, repeating shapes and patterns and so on.
This was the first time I worked on a big series and I was really in a flow, I felt I could go on and on. This is definitely something that I will come to back to, I feel that I haven’t exhausted my ideas on this subject and with these techniques.
