Jen Powell

Neutrals in collage

I talked in a recent post about using tissue papers in my collage work. I had recently just taken a bunch of tissue papers and drew on them so that I had some overlays ready for collage work. I drew some different marks, such as eye shapes and some leaves, circles, and other shapes, in different sizes so I would have a nice variety of papers. I used some of these in some recent, neutral palette works.

This first piece is called Porcelain, since the colors reminded my husband and I of some porcelain cups that we have. This piece is all tissue papers, including the drawn marked ones and some gel plate prints, over a paper-covered wooden background. It’s about 5 inches by 5 inches.

This second piece is just called Neutrals Collage. I used some of my marked up tissue papers and then some non-transparent collage papers layered in. I really enjoy how layering tissue papers adds more depth to the piece. This piece is on a paper-covered canvas. It’s about 5 inches x 7 inches.

Sketchbook collage 12/13/25

Here is a new sketchbook page I made yesterday. My process (for most of my art) is to work intuitively, and just let the collage happen on its own without much pre-planning. I started by just picking some colors, I was going for green and teal, but I didn’t have any collage papers in teal. So I went for blue and green instead. I grabbed out 5 different papers from my homemade collage paper stash. I also found a picture with someone’s face and so that kind of set the tone at the end with all the eyes. I finished with some Posca pens at the end. I’m really drawn to eyes and they show up in my work a lot. I like how this turned out.

Sketchbook Collage 12/6/25

I have been playing with some stuff I’ve learned recently, or relearned. I really like the transparency that tissue paper provides when you layer it in a collage. I have used it in the past a lot but had not used it in a long time. I was reintroduced to it by the class I referenced in my last post, and also by a youtube video I watched recently, showing how to do botanical prints using a gel plate on tissue papers. Those can then be layered in collage. This sketchbook page was fun to make and used tissue paper (and botanical prints I made with my gel plate). I also used water soluble crayons, construction paper, and other collage papers I have made in the past.

Learning new things

I love taking classes through a site called Fibre Arts Take Two, a company out of Australia that has several online classes with teachers all over the world. I’ve taken several of their classes in the last few years. I recently took a class taught by Cordula Kagemann, a collage artist from Germany. I learned several new techniques and had a lot of fun with this class. Here are a few collages I made from this class.

Mini collages for a 100-day project

I had started a 100 day project in the early summer of 2025 as part of some facebook challenge. We were sewing small textile hand-stitched collages. I think I got to day 40 and life just got in the way. Maybe I’ll try again in 2026. Below are some of my favorites: