Gelli plate collage workshop at The Rickyard, Wickenby
Today was a lovely change for me – instead of running a workshop, I was attending one!
I was back at the Rickyard to do a one-day workshop, run by the brilliant artist Lisa Tank. Although we all produced some lovely end products, including greetings cards and some amazing final images on frame-backed gesso boards, the day was really about something else – creating collage papers. We spent a couple of hours in the morning using a variety of papers, gelli plates, acrylic paints and brayers to create interesting papers for later use. This gave each of us around 10-20 sheets of interesting and colourful collage papers.
To make the cards, we were asked to limit ourselves to using just three pieces of paper. That was to encourage us to make quicker decisions – especially helpful for people like me! For our ‘statement’ pieces on the gesso boards, Lisa’s advice was just to get started – cut or tear something out quickly and place it roughly into position, without glue. For me, that meant placing two pieces as ‘sky’ elements. Then, I added several layers of paper pieces to create an abstract landscape composition. Perhaps the most useful or interesting technique was the use of a kind of light tissue paper. When glued in place, it becomes almost transparent, knocking back the opacity of the layers below by around 10%. It was a great way of creating depth, a sense of foreground and background.
The workshop was truly inspirational! A few weeks ago, I bought a pack of Japanese papers with only a few vague ideas of what I was going to do with them. Now, I have all the inspiration I need to get going!
Below: some of the beautiful collage papers, cards and panel images made by us all
Below: my panel piece
