collage illustration

Picasso - Still Life with Chair Caning

I remember as a child being fascinated by a collage illustration on a biscuit tin. Bits of fabric had obviously been stuck on to create the clothes of the figure and although it became a flat image on a tin you could almost feel the texture of the material.
Although collage techniques have been around since the invention of paper, and were popular with the Victorians for their scrapbooks and photo albums the technique is generally considered to have taken off at the beginning of the 20th century when it was used by artists such as Picasso and Georges Braque.

When I googled collage illustration the work of Eric Carle came up. His method is to create coloured papers then cut them into shapes to stick down. The pictures he produces are vividly coloured and by making his own coloured papers he controls the images almost as much as a watercolour artist. The pictures he creates are childlike simplified images which are appealing and accessable to young children but for me lack texture.


My internet search lead me to Ed Young who works in pastel as well as collage. He produced collage illustration using new materials for a childrens book about a cat. The original artwork went missing so he made a whole new set of pictures (respect to him I think I would have given up). These pictures used found items including leaves bark and even fluff plus textures from photographs and scans that he has made.
An example is below:

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He works by making thumbnail sketches then playing around with the collage materials to create an image which is dynamic and interesting. In this example the underlying strength of his observations makes the whole figure work for me, I feel the cat could walk away at any moment.

Lauren Child also uses collaged fabric to create childrens book illustration. I'm not sure whether this counts as collage or mixed media. It's hard to find information online about her techniques but the collage appears more 2-dimensional than the work of Ed Young and I suspect that she scans the fabric and the creates her image either from the scan or from paper printouts of the scan allong the lines of Eric Carle's technique. I think I like her style better than Carle's because although she can choose her fabrics, she is working with found materials which aren't completely in her control

Collage effect is not just used in illustrations for children, the cover of the Beatles Sergeant Pepper album was created by the illustrator Peter Blake and Jann Haworth, an American pop artist. The picture was produced by assembling life size pictures of the figures then photographing them again. The cover was hugely influential, every school art student made montages of cutouts from magazines and Monty Python started using collage stop motion animation around this time.

I prefer pictures that use coloured paper and found objects to create a completely new image which is figurative such as this amazing picture by Sam Price www.samuelpriceart.com ok he's not an illustrator but it's such a lovely example I couldn't resist it


or this illustration by Anastassia Elias beautifully restrained but full of character. The background looks like wallpaper and the collaged papers have been torn or roughly cut to fit. The source material appears to be plain paper and maybe scanned fabric, the shorts/boxers of the figure on the right look like they could be from a map. I wonder whether she drew the figures first or started with the collage. The layout and subject matter make it an illustration rather than the sort of picture you would expect to have framed on the wall.



I suppose there are 3 basic types of collage;

• Found objects
• Recycled pictures
• Using coloured papers generated by the artist

Or a combination of all 3 (with or without other media to create mixed media images)