On Saturday, March 2nd, I attended a Cut & Create Workshop hosted by the Jefferson Visual Communication Design program in partnership with Collage Philadelphia, a collective for collage artists. The workshop took place here on campus in Hayward Hall! Cut & Create was the first in a series of four workshops the VCD program is hosting this spring, free and open to creatives of any experience level.
Although we had to face the miserable cold rain to make it to campus, the workshop was most definitely worth it! As a junior graphic design student, I have been pushing myself to be creative for the past few weeks in order to make it through my classes. With this constant need for creativity in my classes and future career, I sometimes forget to take the time to be creative for myself and fall in love with art all over again. Right after midterm week, this workshop was the perfect opportunity for me to do so. One workshop attendee even called it their “artist date” as a way to practice creating art just for fun rather than for special reasons.
Attendees first watched a presentation by the designer and Collage Philadelphia founder, Jake Dombroski, about the history of collage. I was surprised to learn that the art of collage has origins as far back as the late 1800s! After this, we were able to dig through a wide variety of magazines, books, and other materials in order to choose whatever we would like to collage with. I was interested in a variety of botanical and nature imagery, such as birds and flowers, as well as a variety of historical buildings and mountains. I loved being able to practice some technical skills, such as cutting out images, in a fairly mindless way without having to stress about how it would affect my final design project.
Every attendee at the workshop used vastly different imagery and it was amazing to see all of the collage work together and how diverse it was! Being able to be creative and just let my ideas flow through my own collage work was the perfect way to get me out of my creativity block. I am ready to step into a new week excited to design, create, and share with others. I cannot wait to create my own collage work in the future, as well as attend the other workshops hosted by the VCD program this spring!
If you would like to learn more about Collage Philadelphia, follow them on Instagram @collagephiladelphia. You can also learn about other the other free VCD workshops at @jefferson_vcd on Instagram.