Its been a very long 2 and a half years since our last workshop so we were delighted to welcome artist Fiona Spirals back to M&C for a hands-on, face-to-face workshop. Fiona brought along some of her own collaged artworks for us to see and explained the collage process, from tearing or cutting the paper pieces to enhancing the surfaces with tissue paper and paint.

Fiona suggested the subject of birds and butterflies but members were welcome to tackle any subject they wanted to. Some brought along their own pictures for reference whilst others used pictures from Fiona. She also supplied many magazines for us to tear from and helped all of us individually with our compositions throughout the day. One member had printed her own colourful papers at home to make her butterfly collage unique.

We all used a canvas or canvas board as the base or our collages as using paper or card would get too soggy. The glue used was PVA, watered down to the fluidity of milk.

You will see from the final photo in this section that creating a collage can be very, very messy! At the end of the session the floor was a total mess. Thank you very much to everyone who helped clear up by collecting all the rubbish and sweeping up the day’s detritus.

Everyone enjoyed the day with many expressing a new-found appreciation for collage. Here are all our pictures in a vibrant explosion of colour. Good work everyone!