Cotswold Art Club

Welcome to the Cotswold Art Club

Membership is open to all artists both amateur and professional. The club gives support and encouragement to its members with a number of activities.

DEMONSTRATIONS

Susan Watt – Collage

When a talk ends with most people saying they plan to have a go at the technique, you know it has been a good demonstration.

Susan demoed a seascape landscape in 2 hours all made from bit of cut up magazine. She started by talking about the design using the rule of thirds and sketching a quick zig zag entrance into the picture. The collage would be started at the back and worked forward with the pieces getting larger the closer they are to the viewer.

Starting with the sky, a set of small shapes, mostly diamond, in shades of blue. These were placed on the slant to give some dynamism. The interesting this is that your eyes then decide they look like clouds. Some far distant mountains in 3 shades of purple were layered over each other. Then the fields above the cliff were layered in shades of green with one spot looking like it was touched with sunlight.

Making the rocky cliffs was really interesting. She had a folder with potential rocks, one was a couple of horse, another a wedding picture and several other random ones. The common theme was area of light and dark strips. She decided on the horses, cut a rough long triangular shape, turned it sideways and hay presto a rocky cliff face.

The sea was made in a serious of long shapes, with the ends cut to a point. The colours ranging from purple, blue through to greens. The horizon line was created from a thin strip at the edge of a page. Then the strips added from the darker colours to lighter green but also mixing them up. Along the shore line torn pieces were use to show waves and then an assortment of different texture to allow the idea of rocks and foam.

The beach was built with some pinky sandy colours, with some light purple for the wet sands.

Finally the green foreground was built with lots of different greens with the idea of quiet corners putting the interest on the diagonal lines. Vertical grasses were added randomly but cutting up tiny strips of paper that had green on both sides. These were placed very randomly to break up the greenery edge. This is not a final result but a demonstration in the various techniques that can be used.