Collage lesson
During this lesson I used many techniques of which I learnt throughout my previous attempts at college, to create various quick collages exploring mainly texture, to portray a subject. Firstly ripping half a pages worth of newspaper and using pva to adhere it to the page.
Throughout this whole process I took pictures at each stage to show the development of the technique as with each collage I improve and the progression from beginning to the end, stage by stage.
After gluing the newspaper to the page I then added a layer of emulsion over the top of the collage to mute the undertones of green within my piece. 
While both the glue and emulsion were still damp I gradually ripped parts of collage from the page. I encountered the problem that due to the fact I heavily glued the pieces of newspaper to the page, it was hard to rip off a great deal of the medium meaning I was then limited in the textures that I could create. I continued to gradually tear off pieces of the newspaper until I was happy with how the surface of the collage looked. At this point of the process I took a separate piece of sugar paper in black and glued the sections that I ripped off the original collage onto this separate surface. In doing this I create two collages from one original piece, this method provides with a quick surface with vast amounts of texture and multiple surfaces from one starting place. The process could be continued multiple times over to make multiple surfaces. When adhering the ripped pieces from the original collage to the separate paper, I repeated the process of using pva and then a layer of emulsion as I did with the first piece. On the first surface I also applied a second layer of emulsion. As when ripping pieces of the newspaper off, more colours were exposed, the emulsion yet again muted these colours.
I then worked back onto these surfaces with compressed charcoal, as the nature of the surface is heavily textured I chose the subject of the piece to be a dead leaf as that had a similar texture to the one that had I created, meaning much of the character of the subject was already portrayed by the surface. Compressed charcoal also has the property that it picks up on the texture of the surface you're drawing upon which made this image quite successful. As the piece was still quite damp due to the wet mediums used in excess, it made parts of the drawing smudged and not as intense in colour as other sections of the image. However I do think that this adds a good amount of contrast to the image as it portrays the effects of charcoal on a variety of surfaces all in one piece. In a way this image isn't a great likeness of the subject I was studying due to the black border created by the charcoal and the lack of negative space. However I feel that this piece shows more characteristics of collage than realism, so it can be quite successful to work in a brash and heavy fashion. When looking in closely at the image you can really see the effect that the different areas of the surface had on the compressed charcoal.
I then used the same technique of working over the surface with compressed charcoal on the second collage made from ripped sections of the original piece. When I was initially pasting the newspaper onto the page I heavily glued them, which made the process of ripping sections away fairly difficult this resulted in not much newspaper going towards the second collage. When coming to draw over the second collage this hindered me quite significantly as due to the black background and lack of white collage the charcoal didn't show up particularly great. This is something that when completing the second round of this technique I learned to not use as much pva in the first stage.
As shown in the image the lack of clear line the piece becomes very abstract and hard to interpret. Throughout all the collages I created I used black as my background for the second image, which If I used this technique again in the future is something that I would change, If I used back again I would also use chalk rather charcoal as it would prove for a more successful image.
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