Make Art Anywhere and Anytime (Elementary Level)

Did you know that artists have been combining materials on surfaces for thousands of years? The Chinese began combining painting and calligraphy soon after they invented paper, which happened over 2,000 years ago!

For a long time, the most famous artists in Europe did not think of collage as a true form of fine art. In fact, they didn’t even have a name for it—but a big change happened when Spanish artist Pablo Picasso and French artist Georges Braque began to try lots of new ways to make art. They felt free to include different and surprising material on their canvases. After a while, their works of art convinced the artists of Europe that combining a variety of items on a surface really could be considered fine art!

Picasso and Braque even gave the technique its name. Collage comes from the French verb “coller” which means “to glue.”

Wineglass and Newspaper

Does this look like other still lifes that you have seen? Picasso enjoyed trying new techniques and styles! The images in the center oval represent a goblet, a newspaper, and a table. Picasso was experimenting with a style called Cubism in this work. In fact, Picasso and Braque created this new art-making style in Paris between 1907 and 1914.

In this painting, Picasso wasn’t creating a realistic recreation of what he saw. Instead, he was showing the different geometric forms as if they were broken up and reassembled into a new arrangement. Cubists also often tried to show objects from lots of sides at once!

These curiously shaped objects are painted on an oval piece of canvas—and the painting even includes sand! Picasso glued the oval painting to a rectangular rough-woven canvas, making a very simple collage.

Many of Picasso’s works combine even more types of materials to create interesting works of art. You can learn more about how Picasso and other artists used the techniques of collage at this website, offered by Weiner Elementary School in Arkansas: https://www.weinerelementary.org/picasso-and-collage.html

The Dove

Here’s another work by Picasso. To make The Dove, he simply cut out the shape of a dove and added a few pencil lines to suggest feathers. He attached the cut-out to a piece of dark blue paper.

Doves appear in many of Picasso’s drawings and paintings—and he named his daughter “Paloma,” which is the Spanish word for dove.

Is there an animal or image that means a lot to you?
What does it symbolize for you?

(A symbol is something that represents something else because it makes us think about the thing it represents. Many times a symbol that we can see represents something that we can’t see.)

Do you include personal symbols in your work?

Collage Can Be Very Simple or Very Complex!

For many years, there was a VMFA tradition in which Artist Fellowship winners and Studio School teachers created holiday card designs for the museum’s collection.

Do you see the number at the end of the information in the caption for this image? That’s the work’s accession number. Every work in the collection has its own accession number, which is always used to identify it. This number tells us that the work was acquired by the museum in 1968 and was the 76th work accepted into the collection that year. The database doesn’t give more information about Frank Moore, but he probably taught classes at the museum.

This work seems very simple, but think about how Moore used torn paper to suggest a wintry landscape. Would you like to make a landscape with torn paper? We’ll explore making one of those after we learn how to make our own glue and gather some materials!

Where Can You Find the Materials for Collage? Everywhere!

Your collage materials could include newspaper, magazine clippings, paper scraps, old drawings and doodles, and lots of other things! Take a tour of your home looking for possible materials. Be sure to organize what you collect to make the items easy to find.

If you were going to make a collage that reflects your lived experience in the last year, what would you include?

You might begin by quickly writing down words and sketching images that spring to mind. How could you express these thoughts through collage?

Could you paint with homemade materials?

Jimmy Lee Sudduth found a way to make his own paint—and you can too!

Jimmy Lee Sudduth’s mother was a “root woman,” or local healer, who used natural remedies. In an interview, he remembered that he began making art while playing with mud. He painted a picture with his fingers on wood, but was upset when it washed away in the rain. He discovered how to add a binder to his pigments when he was nine years old. (A binder is a substance that holds the particles of paint pigment on a surface.)

He explained: “I was up there with a man making syrup and he dropped the syrup in the mud. I picked it up and felt that mud, and put it on the wall and it wouldn’t come off. The sugar is what held it there. I mixed the syrup and the mud and put it on a piece of wood. That’ where I got started. I wanted to make things after that.

He taught himself how to make his own paint using different colors of “dirt.” He said, “I got twenty-three colors of dirt in my own yard. Walnut hulls and coffee grounds do good, too. Purple and red in the berries. . . . Mash them with a stick. . . . Grass, weeds, turnip greens, pine needles can make green.”

No paintbrush? No worries! Sudduth tells us, “My hands is my brushes.”

Quotations from “Cutting to the Slice” by William Arnett, drawn from conversations with Mr. Sudduth:  https://www.soulsgrowndeep.org/artist/jimmy-lee-sudduth

Josef Albers was an artist who was fascinated by color. He understood that the colors we see can be affected by the colors around them—and by the light that falls on them! He was also interested in how lines could be used to create a feeling of depth. He believed that we learn best by making experiments ourselves.

We learn by doing!

Here’s one example of his explorations of color and line. Spend some time looking at it.

What do you notice?

How did changing the order of the colors change your experience?

Another Work by Albers

Here’s another example of a work that investigates line and color.

Although the design is flat, do you seem to see depth in this picture?

How has he created this impression?

Art Challenge:
Explore how colors work together by constructing squares and rectangles using colored paper, a ruler, scissors, and glue. Try to keep all of your lines as straight as possible!

Think about the work created by all the artists we’ve explored in this resource.

How many new ideas do you have for making art? A journal or idea notebook of your ideas and discoveries can be a super catalyst for practicing artistic behavior.

Keeping notes on discoveries and possibilities can inspire you to take your artwork to new levels, and use your creativity in new and compelling ways!

A loose-leaf binder is great for this because you can slip drawings and other items into clear sleeves.

You can also reorganize the pages—or pull out the ones you’re working with.

Don’t have a notebook?

Make your own using “found” or repurposed material.

Finding solutions will boost your creativity!

The tie holding these pages together is made from strips of plastic grocery bags, tied together and braided.