collage papers – Jen Powell art

Daily collage practice 2026 – Part 6

Info about this series: At the beginning of the year, I found a little notebook at a thrift shop, and decided to try to do a daily collage to fill it. I created 58 daily collages. I am really proud of the work I did. Not all of the pieces are as successful as the others but they all turned out good in my eyes. Another artist online (I cannot remember who) was talking about using a 3 plus 3 prompt – 3 papers of one color family, and 3 neutrals. So that was my prompt for this series. There are a few pieces where I split one of the papers and repeated it but the prompt was still mainly followed. Most of the papers were created by me with a few exceptions. The collage papers were painted with acrylic paint or ink, or drawn with marker or pen, or made using my gel plate. Some are regular (non-see through) paper, many are tissue or rice papers. I did not add any embellishments besides the pasted paper. This post is part 6 of 6 posts showing all 58 collages in the series. I hope you enjoy.

Thank you for checking out my series. If you have missed any installments make sure to check out the last few days’ posts.

Daily collage practice 2026 – Part 5

Info about this series: At the beginning of the year, I found a little notebook at a thrift shop, and decided to try to do a daily collage to fill it. I created 58 daily collages. I am really proud of the work I did. Not all of the pieces are as successful as the others but they all turned out good in my eyes. Another artist online (I cannot remember who) was talking about using a 3 plus 3 prompt – 3 papers of one color family, and 3 neutrals. So that was my prompt for this series. There are a few pieces where I split one of the papers and repeated it but the prompt was still mainly followed. Most of the papers were created by me with a few exceptions. The collage papers were painted with acrylic paint or ink, or drawn with marker or pen, or made using my gel plate. Some are regular (non-see through) paper, many are tissue or rice papers. I did not add any embellishments besides the pasted paper. This post is part 5 of 6 posts showing all 58 collages in the series. I hope you enjoy.

Thanks for taking a look, I hope you enjoy my collage art. Be sure to check out the other posts in this series.

Daily collage practice 2026 – Part 4

Info about this series: At the beginning of the year, I found a little notebook at a thrift shop, and decided to try to do a daily collage to fill it. I created 58 daily collages. I am really proud of the work I did. Not all of the pieces are as successful as the others but they all turned out good in my eyes. Another artist online (I cannot remember who) was talking about using a 3 plus 3 prompt – 3 papers of one color family, and 3 neutrals. So that was my prompt for this series. There are a few pieces where I split one of the papers and repeated it but the prompt was still mainly followed. Most of the papers were created by me with a few exceptions. The collage papers were painted with acrylic paint or ink, or drawn with marker or pen, or made using my gel plate. Some are regular (non-see through) paper, many are tissue or rice papers. I did not add any embellishments besides the pasted paper. This post is part 4 of 6 posts showing all 58 collages in the series. I hope you enjoy.

I hope you enjoyed seeing my collages. Be sure to check out the other posts in this series (this is post 4 of 6).

Daily collage practice 2026 – Part 3

Info about this series: At the beginning of the year, I found a little notebook at a thrift shop, and decided to try to do a daily collage to fill it. I created 58 daily collages. I am really proud of the work I did. Not all of the pieces are as successful as the others but they all turned out good in my eyes. Another artist online (I cannot remember who) was talking about using a 3 plus 3 prompt – 3 papers of one color family, and 3 neutrals. So that was my prompt for this series. There are a few pieces where I split one of the papers and repeated it but the prompt was still mainly followed. Most of the papers were created by me with a few exceptions. The collage papers were painted with acrylic paint or ink, or drawn with marker or pen, or made using my gel plate. Some are regular (non-see through) paper, many are tissue or rice papers. I did not add any embellishments besides the pasted paper. This post is part 3 of 6 posts showing all 58 collages in the series. I hope you enjoy.

I hope you enjoyed my collages. Please be sure to check out the other installments of this series if you’d like to see the others.

Daily collage practice 2026 – Part 2

Info about this series: At the beginning of the year, I found a little notebook at a thrift shop, and decided to try to do a daily collage to fill it. I created 58 daily collages. I am really proud of the work I did. Not all of the pieces are as successful as the others but they all turned out good in my eyes. Another artist online (I cannot remember who) was talking about using a 3 plus 3 prompt – 3 papers of one color family, and 3 neutrals. So that was my prompt for this series. There are a few pieces where I split one of the papers and repeated it but the prompt was still mainly followed. Most of the papers were created by me with a few exceptions. The collage papers were painted with acrylic paint or ink, or drawn with marker or pen, or made using my gel plate. Some are regular (non-see through) paper, many are tissue or rice papers. I did not add any embellishments besides the pasted paper. This post is part 2 of 6 posts showing all 58 collages in the series. I hope you enjoy.

Daily collage practice 2026 – Part 1

At the beginning of the year, I found a little notebook at a thrift shop, and decided to try to do a daily collage to fill it. I created 58 daily collages. This post is the start of the series of all of them. I am really proud of the work I did. Not all of the pieces are as successful as the others but they all turned out good in my eyes. Another artist online (I cannot remember who) was talking about using a 3 plus 3 prompt – 3 papers of one color family, and 3 neutrals. So that was my prompt for this series. There are a few pieces where I split one of the papers and repeated it but the prompt was still mainly followed. Most of the papers were created by me with a few exceptions. The collage papers were painted with acrylic paint or ink, or drawn with marker or pen, or made using my gel plate. Some are regular (non-see through) paper, many are tissue or rice papers. I did not add any embellishments besides the pasted paper. Below are the first 10 of the 58 I created. I hope you enjoy.

Thank you for checking out my collage series. I will post the others as well.

Homemade collage papers

I needed some more papers for my stash, so I made some this weekend.

I have been digging in my non-tissue paper stash recently, and realized most of the homemade neutral papers I had were made with ink. The ink I used is not waterproof. I use different glues depending on the project – if I’m using a glue stick it doesn’t really matter if the marks on the pages aren’t water proof, but I have been using a lot more matte medium lately and that will make colors run if they are not waterproof. Sometimes it screws up a piece because I’ll lose color saturation if my drawn marks run, or the color ends up in other places I didn’t want it to go. I decided I needed to make a bunch of neutral papers with acrylic paint, so that I won’t have this problem.

I have a large stash of scrap paper – essentially recycling copy or inkjet paper that I had printed on previously. I prefer to work with copy paper over thicker drawing paper because it seems to glue best for me. I took several sheets of those old printed papers and made a bunch of marks on the back, first with black paint, then grays, then brown or browny-gray. I tried to vary the marks so I have a nice variety to work with. They range from geometric shapes or lines to circles and more organic shapes, to dabbed dots. I used different paint brushes, some homemade mark-making tools, sponges, and daubers. I even took a spray bottle and squirted a couple of pages when the paint was still wet to get it to run, and this gave some more interest to those pages.

Now I have a lot more neutral-colored collage papers to work with.

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.