Discover the art of collage — cutting, arranging and layering materials to create new compositions.
Collage is an art technique in which a variety of materials — torn or cut paper, fabric, photographs, magazine images, natural objects and found materials — are arranged and glued onto a surface to create a new composition. The word ‘collage’ comes from the French word ‘coller’, meaning ‘to glue’. Collage was embraced as a fine art form in the early 20th century by artists including Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, who incorporated newspaper cuttings into their Cubist paintings. Henri Matisse, in his later years, created extraordinary large-scale collages using cut-out coloured paper — works he called ‘painting with scissors’. Collage is a wonderfully versatile and accessible technique: it can be purely abstract (arranging shapes and colours for their visual effect), representational (building up a recognisable image from pieces), or mixed media (combining collage with drawing, painting or printing). Thinking carefully about texture, colour, pattern, scale and composition is just as important in collage as in any other art form.
