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The making of Summers in Norway and my best collage tips!

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Keeping it scrappy

In my MapCrunch travels, I came across this Norwegian landscape. I don’t actually know where Straume is, or if that’s even what this place is called, but I imagine this was taken in the countryside with the most sprawling and picturesque hills.

This warm up that I’m calling Summers in Norway was made with my trusty collage scraps. I’ve been collecting my paper scraps from collages past since I started collaging almost two years ago and keep them in a pink Hello Kitty lunchbox.

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These scraps have been great for my warm up collages and add a nice challenge when trying to collage large areas with one color, like the grass. In this newsletter post, I’m going to walk you through how I made this piece and share my best collage tips.

Let’s go!

The making of Summers in Norway

• For my landscapes, I don’t sketch or make color mockups for them. I choose the subject furthest in the background, in this case the mountains, and try to find the best colors to match the reference. Scraps with fun colors and textures — or even patterns! — make even the most simple landscapes interesting.

• I also think about the shapes in the landscape and how I can translate them to paper. Rocks are especially fun to collage though because you can rip the top and cut the bottom for a sleek straight edge (Houses are also fun when they aren’t as small as my thumbnail.)

• Collage is pretty straight forward as far as art goes. You cut the paper and stick it down. But my new favorite tool is the purple plastic scraper you can see me using in the video below. It has a blunt edge that’s perfect for smoothing down freshly glued paper. Nothing is worse than finishing a collage or coming back to an old one and realizing the edges are lifting!

• For the finishing touches, I use Neocolors to get the chunky lines I love so much. These fancy artist crayons add a wonkiness that really complements my collage style. (Click to go back in time and buy them with me!)

📍 Somewhere in Straume, Norway

Those are all the collage tips I have for you. I hope they’re helpful if you ever find yourself with a monster pile of scrap paper. Now onto the process video! Free subscribers can watch a preview of the video here.