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 most magazine photos.

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 from a newspaper are also suitable.

Actually, everyone has the ability to see one thing in another, like Steinberg’s spreadsheet becoming a skyscraper, even if we might not do anything with it. Working with collages surely can stimulate this ability. For example, I unexpectedly saw a bird’s head in my AXA bike key. Here, I’ve added the bird’s body and a worm.