A Montessori school in nearby Vancouver, WA, invited me to facilitate a collaborative collage project to benefit their annual fundraising auction. Each class of students was assigned a class of animals (such as mammals, reptiles, etc.) and chose one they wanted to represent in their collage. I created initial sketches of each selected animal to help structure the collaged image. To help ensure the outlines wouldn’t get completely buried under layers of collage, and to enable more hands to work on the collage at once, I outlined the animal itself on a separate piece of poster board, and the background on a 16 x 16″ panel.
Over the course of two sessions, the kids decorated paper (using stamps and rubbings from assorted found materials) and then assembled the collages.
Once the kids were all done, it was time for me to take the final collaged pieces home to assemble together. I tried to keep any clean-up to a minimum to stay true to the kids’ efforts, so I limited my own contributions to just a couple themes: ensuring the image “made sense” (e.g., if a branch was interrupted with a piece of sky midair, I tried to resolve that), and providing enough contrast so the image as a whole was easy to interpret (e.g., if the foreground and background were too close in value, I applied darker or lighter washes to better disambiguate the shapes).
I was concerned that given the collaborative nature of the project, some kids wouldn’t feel “seen” in the final result, so I also encouraged each kid to create their own mini 1 x 1″ drawing of the animal, which I included as a border on each class’ final panel.
This project came together on a very quick timeline and I wish I’d had more time to spend with such a thoroughly delightful group of kids! The school community was quite happy with the outcome and the auction was a great success!
