Direction Collage With recycled material is my first piece that I created in a new series I have started on using recycled material in my collage artwork.  I have worked in collage before, mostly using fabric, print, painted tissue paper and foil.  For this series, I decided to push it up a notch or two and try some materials that I had not tried before.  I had accumulated quite a few packages of  little wooden pieces that come with stretched canvases.  They come attached on the back and are used to tighten the canvas by wedging them into to the corners of the canvas if needed.  I hardly ever use any so had quote a few to work with.  First I painted a gallery board.  Next I painted the little wooden pieces in different values that would coordinate with my background on the gallery board.  After the pieces dried I took a heavy-duty nail file (emory board) and filed the edges on the long sides of the wood pieces.  I did this not so much to make them smooth but to give a contrast of the natural wood on the dark background.  I played around with them to see what type of composition I wanted to create by moving them around the surface and then evaluating several different ideas.  Gluing them down to the surface was next.  I used Tacky Glue for this purpose.  To finish the piece I cut pieces of tissue paper and black paper and then used acrylic medium to apply them to the surface of the gallery board.  To finish the piece I coated it with several coats of acrylic medium.

This Direction Collage with recycled material is one of my favorite collage pieces I have done in sometime.  I like the quality of dimension the wood pieces give it and it was a huge satisfaction to me to create a piece of artwork from something that was in abundance, but would have been thrown away under ordinary consequences.  It is interesting to open my mind and I hope the minds of others too that art can be created with many more materials that traditional paint.  the title of the piece is Direction because I feel that life needs to have a direction but sometimes it is difficult to find this path.

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