i was recently commissioned to make a collage for a Christmas gift. the person who commissioned me wanted to give the collage as a friend. the catch was that the friend is a steelers fan. so it needed to be a steelers collage. well, i was excited about this, but i was also a bit perplexed about how to mix my particular style of collage with a collage with such a predetermined subject and palette. so i got some materials and got started.
just some art paper, some mod podge and other basic tools. then i gethered together a bunch of steelers papers that i have.
next i made a large collage out of these papers by cutting and gluing and just putting things wherever i liked. then i painted over this collage with a layer of gesso, which is a kind of white paint. before the paint dried, i used paper towels to sort of wipe off some of the gesso so that you could still see the collage underneath. it looked like this:
by now, a brainstorm had come to me. so my next step was to make three separate collages that i would use in tandem with this one. here they are:
after i made the three collages at my desired size, i then used acrylic paints to repeat the process i used before with the gesso. i painted over each collage with a different color, and then used paper towels to wipe off excess paint, leaving the collage underneath visible. the results of that process were these:
so after i had these, i took a steelers logo that i had and magnified it on a copier to a huge size. then i used one of the hypocycloids (the diamonds on the steelers logo) as a pattern. i used the pattern to trace the hypocycloid on each one of the three colored collages, and then cut out the shape. i then arranged the three hypocycloids on my original white collage in the shape of the steelers logo, and glued them on. after a final coat of matte finish, and a frame, the end result was this:
"hypocycloid"
mixed media collage
gregory a. milinovich
i was really happy with how this turned out, and how i was able to make a steelers collage that still felt like it fit my style. my friend was happy with it, too, and he said his friends really liked it as well. it's always a challenge when you are commissioned, because you are never sure if what you make is going to match the commisioner's vision, but in this case i felt really good about it.
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