Photo kintsugi

Series: Collage Makers Summit 1

Collage Makers Summit from Drew Steinbrecher
Workshop: Photo kintsugi
Host: Jack Ravi website – Instagram

It’s been a while since I did any collage, partly because I’ve been so focused on embroidery recently, but I do enjoy it and I have been wanting to do some more. Conveniently, this desire happened to coincide with the announcement of the Collage Makers Summit, a paid event that brought together workshops from 14 collage artists, some of whom I’d heard of and a lot that were new to me. After having a quick look through their Instagram accounts, I decided that there was enough that interested me and signed up (though I still haven’t watched all of them yet).

I needed a photo as the focal point for this class and chose this one of me and my brother on the farm where I grew up. I wasn’t about to tear the original in half though, so I printed a copy using my little Canon Selphy printer. (This really comes in handy for printing photos for my mum who doesn’t do computers.)

For the background, I chose various nature-related papers, along with some neutral papers and part of a map of the area I grew up. The base is the cover off a book that I had read and designated as potential collage material; I have got a lot more relaxed about destroying books as a source of art supplies…

In the end, I didn’t create the kintsugi effect the same way as in the class. Or rather, I did, but found the effect underwhelming, so I added more gold to create more impact.

Do I like the end result? Kind of. I liked it more before I realised that the photo could be interpreted as symbolic of a broken relationship (which is not the case), rather than simply a torn photo that had been fixed. But apart from that, I am happy with my paper and layout choices and I can’t think of anything I’d change about it.