Magazine Color Collage

Collage is a French word which means “glue.” The term was coined by Braque and Picasso in the beginning of the 20th century, when collage became a distinctive part of modern art.

1. I've found this to be a really good project for kinders and 1st graders. They enjoy the hunt for images, and benefit from some simple guidelines. Each student needs a couple of magazines, white paper, scissors and glue stick. They are to choose one color, and then collect as many different objects or swatches in that color as possible.
3. All of the images are glued onto the white paper, with the goal of overlapping and filling it up. This is really simple, but the fact that each picture will have a theme really unifies the images and can create some stunning artwork. Plus, everyone is getting lots of scissors cutting practice, without really thinking about it!
CA Visual Art Standard: Creative Expression, Kindergarten
2.3 Make a collage with cut or torn paper shapes/forms.

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Fruity People Collage

One CA Visual Art Standard centers around how to create feelings with one’s own artwork. This book “How Are You Peeling?” is full of some very creative photographs of fruit and vegetables, all made to reflect a wide variety of emotions. Reading it first helps to make connections that certain shapes can look a lot like faces, when using one’s imagination.

1. I’ve collected some photographs of fruit and vegetables, the low resolution type that are free for comp making. You can download the 2-page file HERE. Print as many copies as needed on inkjet paper.

2. I recommend that the students start by choosing a large shape to make the head, then the body, legs, arms, and finally details on top.

3. After all the body parts are collected and laid out, they are glued down with a glue stick.

CA Arts Standard: Creative Expression. 

2.5 Use lines in drawings and paintings to express feelings.

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CD Case Diorama

Here’s one more recycle project – using a CD case, cardboard boxes, and dried beans.

1. Collect clean cardboard packages, such as those used for cereal, crackers, pencils and markers. Open them up and cut out simple vehicle shapes, along with mountains, trees and sun.

2. Glue a small amount of dried beans to the inside of a clear CD case with white glue.

3. I prefer double-stick tape to attach the cardboard to the CD as it keeps the shapes lying flat.

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Recycled Mini Books

This is good for Earth Day or anytime you wish to make a recycling project. I’ve started to save cereal and pasta boxes all year round so that I have a good stash whenever I need one.
1. For a kindergarten class, I took clean cardboard boxes (like cereal or pasta) opened them up to lie flat, and cut them on the fold to a 3.5" wide x 5" tall rectangle using a paper cutter. Cut on an edge that already folds flat so that the “book” opens to a 7" x 5" size.
2. Take any old leftover paper blank paper, fold it and cut to the same dimension as the cardboard.
3. Place the blank paper inside the cardboard and staple at least twice on the outside of the spine so that the sharp points of the staples are hidden on the inside.
4. NOW, you can give these to kids and have them do any number of activities, including making "nonsense" collage drawings as shown. Older student such as 3rd to 5th could staple the books together. And if you are able to get one of those extended staplers, you can make books that are much larger.

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La Boca House Collage

La Boca is a neighborhood, or barrio of the Argentine capital, Buenos Aires and is a popular destination for it’s colorful houses. Looking at lots of photos of these amazing buildings is a good way to start this project.

1. I discovered these really cool Fiskar paper crimpers at JoAnn Fabrics, and brought several to class. Older students can try to roll the paper themselves, and younger ones can watch a demonstration to see how they work. I started with giving each student a white background paper, and then lots of crimped paper to experiment with. I prefer the nice stock used for scrapbooks, but I think any construction paper will do.
2. Ask the students to cut large rectangles and matching roof shapes for their homes, and distribute white glue for attaching them to the white paper. The buildings should all be sitting side by side. Rotating the texture adds interest to their collage.
3. Finally, flat paper may be drawn on with a marker to create windows and doors. These shapes are cut out and glued to the buildings.
CA Visual Art Standard: Creative Expression, Grade One
2.7 Use visual and actual texture in original works of art.

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Cityscape from Book Pages

I was about to get rid of an old box set of paperback dictionaries, when I realized the pages had just the weathered look that I wanted for a collage project. Lots of other books would work too, it’s just best if they are aged a bit to get that gray cast.

1. Starting with a black sheet of paper (I like scrapbook paper if it is on sale) and several printed pages from old torn up books, students first cut out building shapes. I also handed a printout of black and white city skylines for students to get inspired by, which you can download HERE.

2. Students were to draw lots of windows on their buildings with a fat, chisel tip black marker and then outline the edge of each building with a medium tip black marker.

3. The buildings were glued down with a glue stick.

4. White details were added to the sky using a white colored pencil.

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Faith Ringgold Flag Story Quilt

Faith Ringgold, an African-American artist, is best known for her large story quilts. In 1985 she made a piece titled “Flag Story Quilt” which inspired this collage.

1. In order to get students cutting right away, I plan to give them this template to follow, printed on a 8.5" x 11" cardstock. They will get several magazines with the goal being as follows: red swatches of color are cut and glued inside the long boxes, magazine type in between, and blue swatches in the large rectangle. These are all done in pieces, overlapping when necessary. In other words, students are to combine smaller pieces to fill each area.
2. After all the gluing is done, students will receive lots of little white circles cut from a hole punch. With a glue stick, they cover the blue rectangle with glue and then arrange the white circles on top.

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California Collage with PDF Template

My experience with collage is that students enjoy them, but often have trouble filling a paper in one class session. I thought that if they all work on one large project, they might stay on task a little better.

I’ve made a large multi-page California template that measures about 30" tall. The file may be downloaded HERE.

1. To make my collage, I first printed out and trimmed all the pages...

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Fall Watercolor Tree Collage

This was recently a very successful project for 3rd to 5th graders. I like the contrast of the soft watercolor against the crisp cut leaf edges.
Week 1. Give the students two 9" x 12" sheets of paper and watercolor paints. Instruct them to paint one sheet with a green grass base and blue sky. Dabbing the wet sky with a dry paper towel can create a soft cloud effect. The remaining sheet is to be completely painted in splotches of warm colors - red, orange and yellow.
Week 2. Give the students a rectangle of black construction paper to cut out a tree trunk silhouette with branches on top and roots on the bottom. This gets glued to the blue and green (sky/grass) paper. The remaining splotchy paper gets cut into small triangle shapes and glued to the tree, sky and ground.

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Student Art from Georgia

This student art was sent in by Laura Kim of Roswell, Georgia. She was writing to share what her students did with my Landscape Collage project, and I just adore the results, so whimsical and colorful. I would challenge any professional artist to match the personality shown in these. Below is Laura’s description of how her students created their art.

“First day we talked about landscapes and I had the kids paint a 9x12 paper with turquoise tempera cakes. After that, we talked about painting pages from an old book in an effort to recycle. I also talked about getting permission to rip up an old book. I demonstrated to the children how to paint one page green, one page yellow and then another page any ONE color of choice except for black (we used watercolors). If the kids finished all of this, then I kept allowing them to come and get pages to paint ONE color of choice until time ran out.

"The second week I placed their turquoise paper at their seat along with a yellow and green page (we painted as a collaborative effort). We discussed collage and I demonstrated how to cut out simple shapes and glue. They were allowed to come and get pages of other colors from the front table once they completed the grass and sun. We also did a lot of sharing!

"The third week we used a thick sharpie marker and outlined our shapes and added doors and windows if there were not cut and glued.”

Thank you so much Laura for sharing this inspirational work!

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Fall Leaf Butterflies

This project was inspired by Lois Ehlert’s beautiful book “Leaf Man”. A little technology, namely stock photography and a color printer, helped me to make dozens of flat, easy-to-cut and glue leaves.

1. If you are so fortunate as to live near some fall foliage, you can take the real thing to a color copier and make lots of prints of multiple leaves. Or if you are like me, nowhere near any maple trees, you can go to www.gettyone and search for “leaves, close-up”. Download the preview images, which are free, and print out on a color printer. I splurged and used photo paper as the color seems to be about 10 times brighter when I do.
2. Young students can cut out the leaves leaving about an 1/8" of white around the outside. The reason is that intricate leaf shapes can be tricky to cut right on the edge, but because the background will be white, it will look OK. Older students can be more precise and cut out the leaf exactly.
3. The leaves are then to be cut in half right down the middle, along the spine. The two sides are then glued down with a little space left in between. A body and antennae are cut from scraps pieces, or from leftover stems.

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Romare Beardon-Style Collage

Many art historians consider Romare Beardon to be one of America’s most important and inventive artists. Beardon loved collage, combining painting, magazine clippings, old paper and fabric together like a jigsaw puzzle. This project gives a nod to Beardon’s love of photos and texture, but also offers a kinder / 1st grade version of my “Collage Name Card” project.

SESSION ONE
1. Give each student a couple of colorful magazine pages, drawing paper, glue stick and pencil. The students are to center a large simple stick figure of their first name initial on the drawing paper, in pencil.
2. They then form their initial using approximately 1" wide magazine strips. Demonstrate how the magazine strips torn vertically, will stay be pretty even. The students are to trace their drawn initial with the glue stick, covering generously, and glue the magazine strips in place.
3. The students use a peeled crayon and a sheet of plastic canvas (sold at Jo-Ann Fabrics for about 50¢) to do a crayon rubbing with the side of the crayon, all around their collage letter.

SESSION TWO
1. The students use the Crayola Watercolor Mixing Set and water to paint just one solid color around their letter. When complete, they may take a paper towel to dab and speed up the drying process.
2. Finally, a small darker piece of peeled crayon is rubbed along the edges of the page.

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Landscape Collage

You can put your old paperbacks to good use by turning them into art collage paper.

1. Give each students several printed sheets from an old, preferably yellowed book. They are to paint each with watercolor paint, filling each page with large swatches of color. I made a red, yellow and green sheet for my sample.
2. After the pages are dry, the students are to cut out simple landcape shapes, such as a sun, grass, trees, and buildings. The shapes then get glued down to a background paper.
3. After the glue is dry, give each student a ball-point pen to trace around the edges of the shapes, and add details. Double-tracing the lines adds a kind of casualness to the art.

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Watercolor Collage

I love what torn edges do for a project, even though most students seem resistant to it. I think it maybe just takes time to trust that “happy accidents” sometimes happen with this process.

1. Give each student two sheets (I used 9" x 12") of watercolor paper and watercolors. One sheet is to be filled with one color, leaving a border around the edge (I used blue). The other sheet is painted with lots of large patterns and colors of paint. Let dry.
2. Have the students take their patterned painting and tear it into different size pieces of squares and rectangles and strips. Arrange them on the solid paper in a pleasing way and glue them in place with white glue.
3. Cut pieces of yarn and arrange on top of the artwork. I made a sun and rays and a few more lines. Glue in place and let dry.

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Collage Figure Study

This project makes learning figure proportions fun, while still allowing room for creativity. Many poses are possible when your figure can bend in so many ways.
1. Background collage: Each student needs a background piece of 9" x 12" construction paper, and then 2 other panels that were roughly 5" x 12" (I used green and blue in my sample). To get some random sizes going, I asked the students to cut off the end of one panel to make a large square about 5" x 5". They were to cut and rounded off the corners, and glued it somewhere on the background paper. Next they were to cut two medium squares about 3" x 3", round off the corners, and glue those somewhere on the paper. Lastly, they cut some small rectangles to fill the remaining spaces, rounded out the corners, and glued to them down too. A small amount of space was left between the all the shapes, so that they looked somewhat like tiles that fit together.
2. I explained just a few rules about body proportions, namely the ratio of head to body size being 8 to 1, and that the waist generally falls right in the middle. To help them start their bodies, I gave each student a black construction rectangle about 3" x 12". I had them fold the body in half and cut to the find waist. The top section was cut up to make a head and top torso. The bottom half of the paper was cut to make a bottom torso and two sectioned legs. Another strip of black paper was needed to cut out the arms. All the pieces may start out as rectangles, but need to have their edges rounded before gluing down. The body is posed on the background collage and glued down.

CA Visual Arts Standard: Fourth Grade
2.5 Use accurate proportions to create an expressive portrait or a figure drawing or painting.

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Rice Paper Collage Cake

This is the artwork that started it all. I was volunteering in my son’s 2nd grade class and two students went off to a corner to make a birthday card for a friend. I turned around to see this, and my view of what kids can create has never been the same since.
1. When it comes to collage, it helps to give students a theme so they have a starting place to work with. Distribute standard paper for a background, and divide up collage papers into equal groups, and let the students start to create. I had found a high end stationary store that was willing to donate their damaged papers to me.
This artwork came out of a class that was working with a Valentine Card theme, but a birthday card was needed for a missing student and voila!

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Father's Day Stamp Box

Father's Day art projects always seem harder to find for me than Mother's Day, but I like this simple stamp collage box project.

1. I wish I had a giant stamp collection to make art with, but in lieu of that I found some photography on the internet and made duplicate color prints. Print enough to have a dozen or so per student so they can pick and choose their favorite. I also purchased some of the simple wooden boxes available at Michael's, most of which cost about 99¢.

2. Have the students cut out the stamps they want very close to the edge.

3. I've found that the trick to decoupaging paper without any bubbles is to coat both sides with Mod Podge (meaning the box and the back of the stamp) and press together with a brush. Press firmly and coat the top of each stamp with Mod Podge too. Repeat until covered, taking care to wrap some around the edges to cover as much of the box as possible.

4. Let dry completely and finish with a final layer of Mod Podge.

This is a great box for any guy to store all that pocket change they always seem to have.

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Art Journaling 129

This is a mix and match collage project, with a writing prompt that hopefully sparks some creative thinking.

Prep Work: I’ve found that students can get easily distracted if you give them entire magazines to search through, so I tore out two sets of pages for them. One was just a collection of large faces, and the others had large swatches of color or pattern to use for the top of the head. Fashion magazines worked best for the first group and architecture or home decor for the second. Lastly, I cut the U-shaped faces and necks out of manila paper, and had writing paper cut to 6" x 9" for the background.
1. The students started with gluing the writing paper on the journal page, then gluing the manila face and neck on top.
2. The magazine pages with faces were passed out, with several for each student. They were asked to cut out and glue eyes and a mouth on their faces, hopefully each from a different magazine page.
3. The magazine pages with the patterns and color were passed out, with the instructions to cut amd glue some kind of hair or hat or topping to their collage head.
4. Using the lined paper, the students were asked to write and finish the sentence “Hello, my name is _____.”
This page was made by Ayala, a first grader, who happens to have beautiful head of red hair herself. I love it Ayala!

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House Collage

This is a fill-in-the-blanks kind of challenge for students, which can be easier than starting a drawing from scratch.

I looked online for architecture photos, and printed them out in black and white. You could also just xerox magazine photos. Look for a variety of images, making sure to have a selection of house parts including windows, doors, roofs. And feel free to include some landscaping too.
2. Give each student a paper (could be black or white), a selection of photos, and glue stick. They are to take about 5 or 6 different house parts, cut them out and glue them down with space between each.
3.With colored pencils (I like these from Dick Blick), the students are to draw the missing parts of the house, making sure to connect all the elements that have selected. In other words, the house is like a puzzle with missing pieces that they must create. Encourage them to color not only in the blank spaces, but ON the black and white photos as well. The more color, the more cohesive the artwork will become.

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Cool and Warm Color Collage

The very first color theory lesson that students as young as 1st grade can learn is which colors are considered 'warm' and which are 'cool'. Seeking out examples of the colors in magazines and using repetition helps store these two categories to memory.

1. I used my computer and printer to make sheets with windows and outlined words, but this could be done by hand and and xeroxed as well. I folded an 11" x 17" paper, cut two 4" x 5.5" windows and wrote "cool" and "warm" just below them. I cut out the windows for the young students as an xacto knife worked best for the job. It also helps to trace each window to the inside of the paper so that the students know how big of an area they need to cover with their collage.
2. Give each student a prepared folded sheet, several magazines, scissors and glue stick. Show them an example of warm colors (think of the sun) red, orange and yellow, and then cool colors (like the ocean) blue, green and purple. They are to look for swatches of each and glue them into the appropriate rectangle, overlapping them as they go. Once both rectangles are filled, the top can be closed down and taped together if desired. Having a clean window frame around the collage helps for students to see how the colors each have a cohesive look as a group.

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