Paper collage – Jen Powell art

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.

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.