collage anon from earlier with a bruce springsteen collage... hope you love it!! took me maybe 15-20 hours, ten magazines, one atlas, three coffees, too many litres of water to count, and four audio dramas to complete :) i might still do a few tweaks to it (the cap, belt...) but i think im pretty much done now and im super happy with how it turned out!
hello!!! this is incredible!!!!! i love all of the colours and patterns you used, especially for the clothing, and the way you outlined the pocket and the seams of his jeans is perfect! it's all so good! thank you for showing me this, i'm really happy to see it :)
A few people said I should make a post about how I collage, and I love talking about stuff I make, so here we go! l have quite a few progress photos and also timestamps for my most recent big collage (link) so I'll talk about that :) This is about 10% tutorial and 90% me talking about how long things took me, and it is a very long post, FYI.
1. Template
For anything complicated, I make a template using a photo. I have a touch screen laptop with a pen and some mediocre discontinued sketchbook drawing program. It has layers which is what I need. I used to use the same notetaking program I use for school, which does not have layers. I have no idea how I made that work for my Vladdy and Kevin collages.
I used this photo (Kirk celebrating during the last game of the 2025 regular season, in which he hit 2 home runs, posted by the jays on twitter. Sadly I'm not sure who took it) and then in a few different sections, drew on top of it. I have thought about this and decided that tracing like this is fine for a very transformative art thing. (Also i'm not selling these)
Things I consider are obviously the hard outlines of body parts/clothing, and then I figure out the insides. I try to keep a vaguely similar level of detail throughout (at a certain point the face will have smaller pieces than the arms, but I don't want one side of the jersey to be super detailed and the other side to be made up of 4 pieces), and I figure out where I can simplify things. I love doing jerseys, because fabric folds are often pretty defined shapes and also pretty forgiving. I definitely don't put every single one in my design, and it looks very fine (look at the right arm for example (our right, his left)). Hair and especially facial hair are the worst, because how am I supposed to do skin showing through a beard with paper like this? Not sure. Sometimes it just works? In general, I just draw shapes until it looks vaguely reasonable.
(At this stage I always get too optimistic. On my screen, I can zoom in to draw. I can't zoom in on my papers as I'm tracing and cutting them. You will see that in the real version I simplified the jersey lettering, because I tried and just could not manage to do the split font.)
Doing this took me about 1h15m. Maybe a little more, I'm not sure. I mostly kept track of time for this project, but I forgot to pay attention to that while doing the template so this was my guess.
2. Materials
I use plain normal 8.5"x11" printer cardstock as my backing paper. Something sturdier might be better, but this is in my house already and it works well enough. Tools I use are scissors, a craft knife (and replacement blades. Recent and excellent development there for me), a cutting mat, a glue stick (just a cheap one from dollarama. I've decided that I'm opening a new one for each big project even though I don't use up the old ones, because if they dry out even a little they get super globby and hard to work with), and a fine tip sharpie pen. Also my laptop with the photo+template layered so I can check colours as I go.
For my interesting papers, I have a huge amount of magazines (I got so many free when people in my neighborhood were giving them away) and catalogues and such. I especially use a lot of flower/seed/gardening catalogues, and a lot of the free LCBO Food and Drink magazines.
I also have my template printed out a few times. 1 to cut and trace with, 1 to check pieces off when I'm done them, and a few extra in case I rip a template piece and want another copy. I fought my printer software violently for 15 minutes to get it to print at the right size. I am counting that as artistic process time because I say so. (total so far: 1h30m)
3. Collaging
I work 1 piece at a time. I cut out the piece from my printed template with my craft knife and make a mark on the top side (some small pieces are hard to tell back from front, but it does matter, so that helps me), then put it top side to the back of whatever paper I want to use and trace. This means I don't get any pen on the good side, but does sometimes make it hard to line up properly if I want a specific part of a pattern or something or it's a small area of the right colour. Depending in the size and shape, I'll use either the knife or scissors to cut out the traced bit.
If it's an extremely small piece so that I really can't hold the template down well enough to trace it, sometimes I'll glue the template to the paper and cut around it that way, and then peel it off. It isn't ideal, but I had to do that a few times.
I started with the chin, because every part of this cutting template pieces -> tracing -> cutting paper process isn't perfect, so sometimes things don't line up quite as they should. In the past, I've started at the bottom of the page with jersey bits, and then when I got to the face, things were misaligned quite badly for the most detailed section. Starting here mostly avoided that issue.
Ok, here we go.
This is 5 pieces and getting here took ages because I had to go through so many papers to find a selection of the right colours for hair/skin. Running total 2h30m. (As in, finding papers and doing 5 pieces here took an hour. It sped up a little later on.)
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Now up to 29 pieces, running total 5h15m. This is my embarassing disaster of a workspace. You can see where I'm cutting out my template pieces and also checking them off on a second copy of the template. Also, as is very very very obvious, colours and patterns!! I am not going for realism in colours. I could, I guess, but my vision from the start of my whole collaging situation was mixing up patterns, and I still like how it looks. Jerseys especially are, again, very forgiving. If it's jersey shaped and says Blue Jays on it it will look like a jersey no matter how much random stuff is in it.
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Now about (I counted a few times throughout and my numbers did not always match up lol) 68 pieces, running total 8h45m. Long and skinny pieces (like the very left piece of the red sleeve) are very annoying to hold down and trace, and really small pieces like the lines on the white end of the jersey sleeve are truly awful. I could not cut out that template piece without it falling apart, so i just freehand cut a thin strip of blue paper and cut it to the right length and decided it was fine. Overall, the red sleeve was really fun because I had gathered a lot of different red things (blood orange from a cake, some flowers, different photos of fabrics...) and I think it looks cool together.
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This is when I made his teeth too white (got lazy, didn't want to trace the very small and finicky teeth so I just glued the white template paper on) and it looked like he had very bad veneers.
I took that off and did trace and cut out properly, and then this is where i got to that day. Running total 11h30m, 91 pieces. It looks very silly with the gap for the ear, but that was a very finicky part because (with my zoom-enabled confidence) decided I needed some complicated ear design. I put it off.
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And now for the first hand. You can kind of see the order I'm putting pieces in to be sure they fit together. If I had done the thumb before the rest of the hand, it would have been way easier to get the angle wrong and have nothing fit together. After the pic on the right, that's 13h30m and 111 pieces.
(The most terrible thing is if I design myself something where there isn't a clear reference to "anchor" it to. If a piece fits into a curve well, or has a corner meet up with another one, or is the same length as a piece it's next to, that's fine. I don't have a picture for an example, but anything "free-floating" next to other pieces is bad. This may or may not make any sense)
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This is where it got very exciting for me! Because his face was (almost) there! And it looks like him! Before that it was jersey and sleeve and hand (generic) and here it's Kirky (specific)! This is at 16h, 135 pieces. The face was hard to do because of all the small bits (and the shapes and alignments aren't all the best. There are a few gaps that are larger than I'd like, such as to the right of the mustache, but it doesn't stand out much at all, so it's fine
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Face done, jersey base done, now at 18h15m and 166 pieces (that number doesn't match with previous numbers but whatever). At this point it beat the George collage for most time-consuming art project of my life. (Which is surely very short for many artists out there! I was not at all an artsy person for pretty much my entire life until mid 2024, so I have never spent all that much time on art until recently.)
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And now the other arm done. Hands are always hard, but at this point my new blades had arrived and I was using a new sharp one so that helped a little. I definitely used the gluing the template trick here a fair bit. Now up to 20h25m and 193 pieces. At this point this is the main collage done! Just jersey details left!
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I wanted to do the split font on the jersey. I tried and could not make it happen. That was disappointing, but also sped up the last bit immensely! I think it looks pretty good even with the simpler lettering. Also, added the buttons and velcro patch and such.
Final: 21h15m, 206 pieces (and I am pretty confident in that count)
And the final good scan is here
4. General thoughts:
I could have sped this up if I had more organized papers for sure, or if I was not usually collaging between 11pm and 3am (not at my speediest)
New glue every project and frequently changing knife blades is really the move
I should really put this in a frame because right now it is safely in a box to not get dusty or damaged, which is very safe but not very good for me looking at it
I really like talking about myself and my crafts apparently! This is long!
Everybody should make a collage at some point. Not necessarily this complicated or this style (and if for some reason you do, my workflow is certainly not the best way to do this!!!), but some collage. It's very cheap (papers are often free - old flyers, junk mail, newspapers, ask if people nearby are getting rid of old magazines..., scissors and a glue stick are cheap, and depending on what you want to do you might not need a cutting mat or craft knife) and it can be very quick or if you decide to you can make yourself a many hours long agonizing but somehow delightful situation.
If you made it this far thank you for reading :) This was fun to make and then fun to think through again!
The thing about following people for baseball is that almost all of them also nhl hockey post. Which means that rn everybody is exploding and dying and I'm out here like "what if I make a collage with crossword clues in it :D and maybe some pretty pictures🥰"
i do not think i have ever spent this long looking at [redacted blue jays player]'s ass and thighs before. and it isn't even for pervert reasons. wow. he sure does have those. and i have spent about half an hour drawing lines on top of them.
rpf rambles: "ok. maybe i will create things more/better/happier if i set myself goals" edition
creative goals for the rest of july:
finish george/vlad bondage fic (fully intended to do this during the all-star break. i did not. i am prob halfway done? idk i'm really excited about this one)
big collage progress in big ways. i need to finish my template and then i want to have stuff starting to get down on paper for real soon.
some other misc drabble because that always is fun and feels good
ideally substantial progress on my other wip that i will not discuss yet. but if i don't do any of that bc i am successful in my other goals then that's fine too
having conflicting desires (make a large cool collage project and show nothing to anybody until it's done and don't even say what the subject is, then post it and have it be a surprise to everybody) (post about it and talk to my friends about it and show people my progress throughout and then it will not be a surprise in the slightest when i'm done but i will be able to talk about it as i do it which is also nice sometimes)
hi i was wondering how you do your collages (like for your pfp) - they look sick as fuck :) do you just have the basic picture and then try to find other pictures with the same colour to put instead & then piece by piece create the collage? how do you find all those pictures with the right colours (do you have a specific website for that?)
Hello! Thank you so much!!!
I made a post a few months ago about how I made my Alejandro kirk collage (which I'm using for my pfp now), so that might be the best way to explain it: here
I don't really talk about how I find the colours in that post, but I basically just have my reference pic pulled up and I have soooooo many papers (magazines, catalogues, random stuff I accumulate...) and poke around until I find something that matches enough and ideally has some kind of fun pattern or "textured" look. Nothing very complicated actually, just a lot of flipping through papers haha
If you have any other questions please let me know, I love talking about stuff I make and I really appreciate you asking :)
