Chapter 2 | COLLAGE AND DRAWING

It’s fun to combine collage and drawing. The illustrator Saul Steinberg turned cut-out pieces of graph paper into skyscrapers by pasting them on paper and drawing buildings, cars and people around them with pen and ink. He called it Graph Paper Architecture. The great thing is that his graph paper looks drawn, since it doesn’t shine like a magazine photo.

Exercise: Make your own version of Steinberg’s graph paper skyscrapers. If you don’t have graph paper, Sudoku’s, word puzzles, cryptograms or even text fragments (maybe upside down) from a newspaper are also suitable.

The essence of this kind of collage is the special (association) ability of our brains to suddenly see a skyscraper in graph paper, like Steinberg. Often such an association happens by chance, you really don’t have to be a trained artist for it. It can also happen with objects around you where you suddenly see something unexpectedly, such as the AXA bicycle key that has been transformed into a bird’s head here. In this case I have drawn the body of a bird and a worm to clarify the association.

EXTRA: give your own associative power, the coincidental and the unexpected, space in collages and drawings. As a drawer you can have a lot of fun with that.