What Does it Take to Make a Successful Collage?

What does it take to make a beautiful, interesting or in anyway successful collage?  This will be our first topic of the new year.
Collage is primarily a balancing act between shape, color and texture.  How the artist puts these elements together will make the difference between a good composition and a poor one.  The mood or meaning of the piece is generally determined by color and imagery, although other elements like rhythm and contrast play a role as well.
A collage can be two dimensional and appear flat, two dimensional with the illusion of three dimensionality  (depth), or actually three dimensional.  We will look at examples and discuss these further in class.
The students will experiment with the art of collage using torn and cut construction paper, magazines, product labels, junk mail and anything else that we can collect. 

They will also be making a finished collage using the theme "Visualizing 2012"