Found Imagery and Mixed Media - Ann Baldwin

Second-hand books, old magazines, postcards, old photos, playing cards, stamps, greetings cards, wrapping paper are all useful resources for collage. Copyright can be a problem, so, to be on the safe side, alter the image somewhat or use only an unidentifiable part of it. Images that come from bulk advertising are less of a problem. Use your discretion. No one seems to have objected to artists of the past - like Marcel Duchamp or Joseph Cornell appropriating images, and many artists do it nowadays with impunity.

Mixing Your Media
Paint and drawing materials can be used to mask, alter, and integrate images:

Masking
Just as with text, you can apply transparent or translucent glazes to the images to make them less obvious. It is possible to begin with a layer of images which will be barely visible by the time they have been almost covered in paint, then to use this mysterious background as a base for the ‘real’ collage. Or you can use paint to obscure part of an image - one eye on a face, the background of a photograph.

Altering
You can conveniently alter the color of someone’s hair or clothes by painting over them in a different color. You can even paint their clothes out and render them naked! You can put a hat on someone’s head, a pipe in their mouth, and give them bigger shoes. When it comes to copyrighted material, this can let you off the hook. Photos can quite easily be made unrecognizable by a little doctoring.

Integrating
It is all too easy to create a collage which is just a lot of pieces, with no unity. Paint can really help here.

Painting over the edges of torn or cut paper makes them less obvious, so that the viewer is less aware of the separate items which make up the composition.

Glazing in one color gives all the items something in common. Try making sense of a scattered composition, by glazing on rectangles of color.

Connecting items with drawn lines is also a possibility.

Using the same color to paint parts of several different images can provide a visual link between them.

Paste a translucent paper such as tissue or tracing paper over the least unified area. It has a similar effect to a layer of semi-transparent paint.

Finally, you could draw one large contour image over everything, allowing the other items to be seen through it. © Ann Baldwin 1999