Day Three, Part Two: Sketch Collage

Brenda does something she calls "sketch collage," but the name is a bit misleading, since most people think of a collage as bits and pieces of photos, drawings, tickets, leaves, or whatever that you glue into a hodgepodge of images, like scrapbooking. The sketch collage is indeed a pastiche, but it's not cut out and glued together, it's drawn together (literally and figuratively) because of the significance or similarity of the sketches. For instance, you take a trip to a town in Italy, or to the county fair, or to your farmers' market, and do a bunch of small sketches all on the same page, then find a way to relate the images to one another, with words and format. Or you put together a bunch of botanical images, or sketches of birds you saw on your morning out with your binoculars.

Our homework on Friday night was to decide on a theme and pull together some objects or images of objects that we wanted to inter-relate in some way on paper. The results were pretty amazing, and ran the gamut of: architectural wonders from European capitols; the famous buildings of downtown Los Angeles; garden gloves, a trowel, a watering can and a couple of flowers, all tied together by a wandering vine; a robin and its nest/egg, with a border of feathers and bird tracks; and many more. They were all different, all personal, all interesting, all illustrative.

For my theme, I started out with literal artifacts that my parents had given or left me, and I was going to title my page "Inheritance." But as I assembled images, I thought about the less tangible things they had given or taught me, and decided to include some of those, too. Ultimately, my picture remained title-less, but some of the words it inspired were included as book titles on the shelf at the top. (And I included Betty Crocker too, because who doesn't have a copy of the Betty Crocker Cookbook residing in their kitchen?)

This was a fun and instructive exercise, which I hope to repeat.

Note: I tried to do as much of this as possible as modified continuous line drawing, so the candlestick, the door angles, etc. are all a little wacky. Someday I hope to be able to do continuous line with accuracy and grace! So...75 days of practice await (see previous post).

Another note: I had to scan this in two pieces and I couldn't get rid of the shadow across the bottom half of the top or the top half of the bottom.