How To Paint On Magazine Collage – Mixed Media Tips

I spend a lot of time adding patterns and colors to my magazine collage art! My favorite thing is to turn simple magazine pages in fun and funky art!

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VIDEO : How To Paint Magazine Collage

Things used in this video:

Magazine clippings
Flower pics from a catalog
Gel plate background papers
Matte Medium to glue background
Nuvo glue to stick down magazine images
Posca Paint Pens
Sharpie Paint Markers

Initial Foundation Work of the Magazine Collage Piece

Initial Layout of the Magazine Collage Piece

For this media art journal I am using a Creative Journal from Dyan Reaveley! The great thing is how the signatures are put in which allows the journal to open up flat!

For this piece I was looking for different shapes of people that I could use. The big gal is 3 collage elements… A body that was previously on a chair, a large head from someone else and an even larger eye. At this stage I was just checking out different options to get a sense of the basic design (the pieces of paper are not even glued down at this point).

To create different areas in this collage art I added a gal on the right whose body originally was lying on the floor and her head was another gal who was hanging off a chair.

First Round Of Painting – Mixed Media Starts!

This point is the start of the above video… initial stages of the painting! At this point I had used an acrylic medium (Posca paint pens) to add patterned texture to the hair (which is just paper shapes I cut into swoops).

I also painted her shirt with Sharpie paint pens and her pants with Posca paint pens.

You can see the area of wet acrylic paint started to make the glue come up… that will happen when you use thin papers! You just need to re-stick it down with liquid glue or a glue stick once the magazine papers dry!

My main point at this time was to get contrasts of colour in yellow and purple to define the big gal!

Second Round Of Painting – Adding Texture and Pattern

Here is the end of the video. I have added painting and words around the border, started some stripes on her pants and added a cute pattern to her shirt!

The main colours of purple and yellow have been established but I added some pink and a few dots of turquoise to the piece.

I used a white acrylic paint pen for the leg stripes and you will see below that I use that A LOT! If you only can afford a couple of paint pens get white and black and then fill in more as you can afford them!

The “Final” Magazine Collage – Purple and Yellow Lady

After the video I was inspired to finish this gal up! I painted her big eye, highlighted her hair doodles and made even more pattern on her striped pants.

I pulled the turquoise down to her shoes and used that also on the gal on the right so there weren't a ton of competing colors in this piece!

I outlined much of the border in black and put hightlights of white on the words to make them pop out a bit more.

The reason I have “final” in quotes is that I DO want to add more words to the body of the piece but I am not sure how right now. I will save that for anther day!

Painting Magazine Collage Wrapup

Whew, that was fun! I hardly ever show all the steps in my mixed media projects but I got inspired with this gal when I used magazine cuttings to make her hair super fancy!

I find that I like my pieces better when I add different textures to make a fresh look that COULD be in the real world, maybe, kinda sorta if she was a super bold gal!

To make a cohesive piece think about the essential elements of your magazine images… for this one it was the gals in weird positions. Once you have the subject matter figured out you can move on to the painting!

Even though the painting can take a long time, I feel like it is a very useful technique to make your magazine collages more interesting!

Here are some more magazine collage articles you might like: