Art and Craft Fair


Night beach, collage
all images copyright Vivien Blackburn

I'm showing paintings at an Art and Crafts fair in a few weeks and I thought I'd do some cards - most people can't afford the paintings but they can buy cards if they like.

I'll do some with prints of my paintings but I thought it would be interesting to do some small abstract collages with fabric, hand made papers, gold tissue and painted papers.

Then I scanned them and played a bit more :>) so some will be printed in their new coats.

This is a variation in Photoshop on the collage above.


This one looks better IRL because some of the fabrics have a metallic sheen, it didn't scan very well - none of the collages did :>(



These were done from memories of the beach in recent paintings.


This is collaged from fragments of an overworked painting - at least it was useful for something!

and below is a variation on it in Photoshop.

and another collage with fragments of the same painting.








For the collaged cards I cut the card to the size that would fit envelopes I had and then designed the printed ones to fit as well. I've got a guillotine/trimmer (one of those where you slide the blade - not the lethal large bladed Madame la Guillotine ones!) to cut the card neatly - I'd never cut it cleanly enough with a knife.

The painted papers were left over from my degree when we had to paint large quantities for a collage project. Painting your own papers makes collage much more interesting than cutting colours from magazines and it's light fast. The different qualities of torn and cut edges are interesting - I exploited the white of the torn edges for the surf.

Some of the white is Tippex pen.

it was fun to work small for a change and to play with abstract shapes. I rarely do collage but I think I must do some more :>)


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