collage workshop funs!

Last weeek I was supposed to go to Brighton for the day. I'd planned to attend a sewer tour with the Brighton Flickr group, and hoped to see the Charley Harper exhibition and had booked an advance train ticket to save money (less than a tenner instead of over twenty quid). Unfortunately, due to the threat of heavy rain, at the last minute I decided to swap bags and take one that was more waterproof, and so I missed my train by an annoying matter of seconds! I debated for a while about just going down to Brighton anyway, but I realised I'd left my camera in the other bag. There was a risk of the sewer tour being cancelled if the rain was too heavy, but there was no way of finding out if that would happen until the allocated meeting time. I decided not to go, since I couldn't really take photos (my phone wasn't at full charge either) and the weather was threatening to be pretty wet.

Instead, one thing I decided to do was go and check out this year's Serpentine Pavilion. (It is hard and shiny and very very red and the cafe is expensive and there's not really much more to be said about it. I also popped into the Serpentine Gallery as I am wont to do when I am in the area, but the Wolfgang Tillmans exhibition was pretty dull.) When I got off the bus outside the Albert Hall, I noticed that there was an exhibition of Roman Cieślewicz posters at the Royal College of Art. I'd been interested in seeing it but I thought it had already closed, so that was a nice surprise (it closed at the weekend though).

The exhibition was good fun. Cieślewicz had a varied career, designing book covers and film posters in Poland in the 50s and 60s, as well as working for all sorts of magazines and institutions when he moved to Paris. There was a strong use of collage which I found quite inspiring and I was looking forward to going home and creating something, when I came into the last room and found a collage workshop taking place. So I collected some printouts of various source images, sat myself in a corner with some scissors and glue and got my art on!

This poster is the first piece I glued down, though it wasn't my first collage idea but more like my third or fourth. The other ones weren't working for me because the pieces were all printed on different-coloured paper and some were awkward sizes and it wasn't as coherent as I wanted. But once I started on this piece it came together really quickly. (the colours came out a bit weird on the camera but it's too big for my scanner!).

After that, I made this one, from just four pieces — see if you can spot the individual elements.

I also took some photos of some of the other collages because I thought they were brilliant.

This fishman was made by the women running the workshop. I later found out one of them was Natsko Seki whose illustration has made the design-blog rounds a few times recently. (The other woman was from Finland but I didn't find out her name.)

This one was done by a teenage boy who kept making it bigger and bigger until it was about half his size.

It's a shame I can't give anyone a proper credit for the rest of these

And here's one last picture, a remixed version of my first collage poster. I ran it through Plastic Bullet when I was feeling bored, and this was my favourite result because it looks like it was taken underwater. Plastic Bullet is fun for that.

I'd like to make more collages now but while I have a box file full of clippings, I don't have any engravings like the ones I used here and they're fun to play with. Anyone know a good resource for copyright-free illos? Most of the sites I've looked at have truly awful search funtions and it takes ages to find anything even remotely interesting or useable.