“I’m drawn to color because it just makes me so happy, it never fails to lift my mood,” explained Blythman in an interview with Kids Gifts and Toys. “When I’m creating new work I decide on a color palette first. Always. At present, I can’t get away from neon pink and peach.”

Her process, which more often than not includes paper collage techniques, involves covering big sheets of watercolor paper in a variety of delicious colors and copper or gold leaf. Blythman then cuts the sheets up only to put them back together again as new artworks. “I often add my signature hand-drawn and painted detail too,” she says.

“When I was young I always loved to cut, paste and layer paper and as a teen I would spend days drawing detailed illustrations of my teen idols,” she recalled. “So I guess in some form or another I’ve always been doing exactly what I still do now,” she adds. “Drawing, cutting + pasting, creating, making things.”

Her recognizable aesthetic has garnered her a legion of fans and a super happy portfolio of work with clients ranging from start-up businesses to high profile Australian and International brands. Here are some of her more eye-popping creations:

The post Laura Blythman’s Art is an Instant Mood Lifter appeared first on PlayJunkie.

Aside from working on commissioned illustrations, Kövecses enjoys exploring small quiet scenes that portray parts of her everyday life. Living in a small seaside village on the island of Cyprus, her inspiration comes from living by the Mediterranean Sea, growing up in Eastern Europe, and being a mother of three small kids.

“I often scribble some vague sketches into my phone or notebooks that lay around the house and then get back to them later to turn them into final artworks,” she described her creative process in an interview with Papirmass. “When working I often surround myself with books and albums on art, plants, children’s novels, landscapes or food that I spread out on the floor like a live mood board,” she notes “I spend the morning drawing or working on illustration projects and drinking way too much tea.”

“It took me quite a while to learn how to distinguish myself as an artist and my other self as an illustrator,” admits Kövecses. “Accepting the fact that as an illustrator I usually have to follow instructions I still find it hard to cope with tweaking my artwork many times before coming up with a final illustration.”

When not working on commissioned projects, Kövecses creates drawings with oil pastels, experiments with clay and paints with her kids’ tempera. She also enjoys baking fresh bread in the morning, picking oranges, and growing veggies in their garden. An ideal lifestyle if you ask us.

The post The Digital Collage Art of Anna Kövecses appeared first on PlayJunkie.

Like most collage artists, Eckman-Lawn’s process is messy, changing depending on the project itself. “Sometimes I have a clear idea in my head (like The Secret for example),” said the Philadelphia born illustrator in an interview with Beautiful Bizarre, “and then it’s just a matter of finding the right images or painting what I need until it looks right. That can be really painstaking but occasionally it all just comes together cleanly.”

He explains that he has folders and folders full of amazing finds for his future collage work. “Sometimes I have to drop whatever I’m doing and start working right away if I find something too perfect to ignore,” he notes. “That feeling is just the best, and a good way to describe the act of collage in general. It’s like being a curator and a designer and an artist all at once.”

So far, Eckman-Lawn’s work has appeared in comic books, on album covers, book covers, T-shirts, music videos, newspapers, and posters.  “I do feel very lucky that I get to make art for a living, and on days where it feels hard, I like to remind myself how much I’d rather do this than anything else,” he says.

We recommend you follow his work on Instagram.

The post Alex Eckman-Lawn’s Collage Art Is Strange, In a Good Way appeared first on PlayJunkie.

“I’m restless, very curious and I’m really open to mistakes,” he described himself in an interview with Another Fine Mess. An artist and an image-maker, he creates imaginary worlds from torn pieces found in the real world. “Organizing chaos is the main task of any collage artists,” he reflected. “From millions of possible images (a universe of chaos), we decide to use only a few and combine them in a particular way to make our discourse visible through them. We are editors of reality and builders of new worlds. We are twisting the world we know to make a new one come to life.”

His process seems to be working, with his work having been exhibited in galleries in Barcelona, London, Madrid, New York, Tokyo, Berlin, Rotterdam, Rome, and Lima, to name a few. He has also worked with brands such as Nike, Wired Magazine, Spotify, and Universal Pictures, providing his signature collage work for commercial and editorial projects.

“I love to work with limits,” Tuja says, describing his creative process. “Most of the times I invent secret (and stupid) rules of production to create my collages. Collages created with 3 pieces and two main colors; collages created with the letters B-D of an encyclopedia and a skate magazine… these are some rules that I impose on myself to create collage series. Limits are boosters of creativity and I love working with them.” According to him, “in commercial work this is not always possible because of time and concept limits. In commercial work the brief is at the same time the limit and the inspiration. You have to make the most of the story that someone else wants you to tell.”

Take a look at some of his creations (commercial and otherwise) in the gallery below:

The post Finding Order In Chaos: Max-o-matic’s Collage Art appeared first on PlayJunkie.

Inspired by graffiti, urban decay, and music, Voelker experiments with his source material, challenging our ideas about collage art. “I developed a process to fix the charcoal to paper to ensure its reliability as a medium for collage,” he explains. “The drawings are cut and arranged, layer after layer until a finished work emerges.”

With printmaking, Voelker first makes the prints with ink or paint, after which he cuts and collages them into complex layers with intersecting lines and spaces. According to him, this work involves an improvisational process of placing the pieces on a board, then arranging them as he sees fit.

Some of his work consists of white ovals or circles framing them (which are also collaged). According to Voelker, these ovals represent portals, through which the viewer is invited to look inside and catch a glimpse of something on the other side.

“I consider collage a language,” he says “and find interest in how individual pieces come together to convey a story.” Take a closer look:

The post Daniel Voelker is Fluent In the Language of Collage Making appeared first on PlayJunkie.

Originally from England and currently based in Berkeley, California, McCann’s creative passion sparked early on, taking to painting, drawing, cutting, and reading from a very young age. “I ended up going to fashion school and working in the industry for a little while but after I moved to the USA with my family I started painting again and taking art classes,” she relayed in an interview with Jung Katz. “I became fascinated with collage and eventually gave up the paintbrush and took up the scissors.”

Now, armed with just a pair of scissors, she creates her intricate, hand cut collages, which she admits reflect her Victorian obsession with faeries, flora, and fauna. Those are collected from her large collection of books, prints, and pages that are antique, forgotten, and foxed with age. “I cut out images, categorize them and then eventually piece them together like a complex paper jigsaw,” she explains on her website.

A common theme throughout her work is the female face, which often acts as a reflection of the natural and sometimes magical world. She can be surrounded by birds, fish, and butterflies or submerged in a dense wallpaper pattern which either represents her prison or her liberation.

Here are some highlights from McCann’s rich portfolio:

The post Where Beauty is Strange and Creatures Are Curious: ​Katie McCann’s Collage Art appeared first on PlayJunkie.

Her magazine paintings aim to liberate and transform the figures she collects beyond recognition to create ethereal yet provocative works that question notions of identity and how women are perceived and perceive themselves. “My aim is to test the limits of the paper and paint,” she explained in a piece she wrote for Create Magazine. “I am looking for reactions between the paint and the paper and how one layer of paint is impacted by the preceding layers.”

According to Brewster, there is often buckling, cracking, and distortions in colors. Such unpredictability is thrilling to her. “I am always testing the materials, colors, and textures to act beyond what I expect and can control,” she writes. “I encourage the paint to do things it’s not supposed to do to create happy accidents.”

Ironically enough, her cut-up paintings and collages have been published in many glossy magazines themselves, including Vogue, World of Interiors, and Marie-Claire Maison. Her work has also been exhibited widely – from Manchester Art Gallery to Sydney, Australia.

But you can also follow her online:

The post Painting, Stippling, and Layering: Claire Brewster’s Unique Artwork appeared first on PlayJunkie.

The results are striking portraits that blend into the paper maps upon which they were illustrated. According to Fairburn, his aim with these works is to preserve the functionality of each map by feeding the composition instead of fighting it. To accomplish this, he often spends hours studying each map before beginning any physical processes.

“I like a map that’s easy to fold away, but I don’t let that influence my choice,” he added in an interview with yatzer in which he described his preferred materials. “I’ll either source my maps from charity shops or old book shops – we have lots of both here in the UK,” he explained. “If I’m working on a specific commission I’ll usually source a map on the internet to make the most suitable choice, in terms of the location. When considering a map to work on, I look at the patterns, orientation, and other characteristics – I usually find that the more ‘cluttered’ maps offer the most scope.”

Using the found paper maps as his canvas, Fairburn is interested in the subtlety of each synchronization, and the way in which each completed map behaves more like a portrait when viewed from further away. Take a closer look:

The post Ed Fairburn Transforms Paper Maps Into Portraits appeared first on PlayJunkie.

Much like her creations, her approach to collage making is rather unique. Intertwining different film and TV genres – from vintage Hollywood to 1970s sci-fi, B-movies, and TV trash – Rivans’ work is in a constant dialogue with cultures of the past, reinventing existing film plots and narratives while spinning bizarre and dreamlike tales.

Like most collage artists, her process begins with an extensive collection of vintage ephemera, which she scavenges from antique books and retro magazines. Like piecing together an unruly jigsaw puzzle, Rivans begins to collate and assemble the cut-out fragments and scraps, laboring over long periods and making alteration after alteration, until the collage begins to take shape.

Her use of collage might reflect the complex and fragmented world from which her art arises, but an attention to beauty and to the harmony of composition gestures optimistically towards the social capacity to piece it back together again.

Rivans’ work takes the form of both large-scale originals and limited edition prints. Each of her artworks is the product of months of careful deliberations and decisions, every tiny tweak necessary in the final formation. The result – whether big or small – is well worth following.

The post Surrealism Meets Pop-Art: Follow Collage Artist Maria Rivans appeared first on PlayJunkie.

“I decided on the medium of collage because I didn’t have money to buy ‘proper’ supplies like fancy brushes or even canvas when I first started out,” he admits on his website. “The paper I used then and still use today comes from abandoned spaces – old farmhouses, burned down buildings, abandoned gas stations, and the like.”

Multilayered and rich in narrative, his artwork weaves tales of foregone eras and untamed wilderness in an attempt to reignite our sense of adventure and wonder for the rugged American landscape. “I grew up on a farm, caught crickets and bailed hay, painted with mud, dug up civil war relics, listened to midnight mockingbirds,” he writes. “These are the ingredients of life that have stuck with me and have built the foundation for the artwork I set forth into the world.” 

Previously employed as an Interpretive Naturalist for the USDA Forest Service, Geiman seeks to combine his interests in art-making with his studies of biology and American history. Inspired by his longstanding fascination with the flora and fauna of his native Shenandoah Valley, country-western iconography, and folk and agrarian traditions, his expansive portfolio includes large-scale faux-taxidermy wall sculptures, elaborate paper collage portraits of classic American icons, and Animalia, as well as a plethora of mixed media works.

Handcrafting each work from an array of materials he’s been salvaging and collecting since I was a child, one single collage piece can take anywhere from a few weeks to a few months to complete. “I like to spend time reminiscing on the past while flipping through the pages of decades forgotten magazines, intently searching for the perfect shape, color, or texture within a periodical’s pages to add to my archive of collage elements,” he says.

Follow his Instagram page for more:

The post Dolan Geiman Reuses Found Materials In Unique Ways appeared first on PlayJunkie.

“I’m drawn to color because it just makes me so happy, it never fails to lift my mood,” explained Blythman in an interview with Kids Gifts and Toys. “When I’m creating new work I decide on a color palette first. Always. At present, I can’t get away from neon pink and peach.”

Her process, which more often than not includes paper collage techniques, involves covering big sheets of watercolor paper in a variety of delicious colors and copper or gold leaf. Blythman then cuts the sheets up only to put them back together again as new artworks. “I often add my signature hand-drawn and painted detail too,” she says.

“When I was young I always loved to cut, paste and layer paper and as a teen I would spend days drawing detailed illustrations of my teen idols,” she recalled. “So I guess in some form or another I’ve always been doing exactly what I still do now,” she adds. “Drawing, cutting + pasting, creating, making things.”

Her recognizable aesthetic has garnered her a legion of fans and a super happy portfolio of work with clients ranging from start-up businesses to high profile Australian and International brands. Here are some of her more eye-popping creations:

The post Laura Blythman’s Art is an Instant Mood Lifter appeared first on PlayJunkie.

Aside from working on commissioned illustrations, Kövecses enjoys exploring small quiet scenes that portray parts of her everyday life. Living in a small seaside village on the island of Cyprus, her inspiration comes from living by the Mediterranean Sea, growing up in Eastern Europe, and being a mother of three small kids.

“I often scribble some vague sketches into my phone or notebooks that lay around the house and then get back to them later to turn them into final artworks,” she described her creative process in an interview with Papirmass. “When working I often surround myself with books and albums on art, plants, children’s novels, landscapes or food that I spread out on the floor like a live mood board,” she notes “I spend the morning drawing or working on illustration projects and drinking way too much tea.”

“It took me quite a while to learn how to distinguish myself as an artist and my other self as an illustrator,” admits Kövecses. “Accepting the fact that as an illustrator I usually have to follow instructions I still find it hard to cope with tweaking my artwork many times before coming up with a final illustration.”

When not working on commissioned projects, Kövecses creates drawings with oil pastels, experiments with clay and paints with her kids’ tempera. She also enjoys baking fresh bread in the morning, picking oranges, and growing veggies in their garden. An ideal lifestyle if you ask us.

The post The Digital Collage Art of Anna Kövecses appeared first on PlayJunkie.

Like most collage artists, Eckman-Lawn’s process is messy, changing depending on the project itself. “Sometimes I have a clear idea in my head (like The Secret for example),” said the Philadelphia born illustrator in an interview with Beautiful Bizarre, “and then it’s just a matter of finding the right images or painting what I need until it looks right. That can be really painstaking but occasionally it all just comes together cleanly.”

He explains that he has folders and folders full of amazing finds for his future collage work. “Sometimes I have to drop whatever I’m doing and start working right away if I find something too perfect to ignore,” he notes. “That feeling is just the best, and a good way to describe the act of collage in general. It’s like being a curator and a designer and an artist all at once.”

So far, Eckman-Lawn’s work has appeared in comic books, on album covers, book covers, T-shirts, music videos, newspapers, and posters.  “I do feel very lucky that I get to make art for a living, and on days where it feels hard, I like to remind myself how much I’d rather do this than anything else,” he says.

We recommend you follow his work on Instagram.

The post Alex Eckman-Lawn’s Collage Art Is Strange, In a Good Way appeared first on PlayJunkie.

“I’m restless, very curious and I’m really open to mistakes,” he described himself in an interview with Another Fine Mess. An artist and an image-maker, he creates imaginary worlds from torn pieces found in the real world. “Organizing chaos is the main task of any collage artists,” he reflected. “From millions of possible images (a universe of chaos), we decide to use only a few and combine them in a particular way to make our discourse visible through them. We are editors of reality and builders of new worlds. We are twisting the world we know to make a new one come to life.”

His process seems to be working, with his work having been exhibited in galleries in Barcelona, London, Madrid, New York, Tokyo, Berlin, Rotterdam, Rome, and Lima, to name a few. He has also worked with brands such as Nike, Wired Magazine, Spotify, and Universal Pictures, providing his signature collage work for commercial and editorial projects.

“I love to work with limits,” Tuja says, describing his creative process. “Most of the times I invent secret (and stupid) rules of production to create my collages. Collages created with 3 pieces and two main colors; collages created with the letters B-D of an encyclopedia and a skate magazine… these are some rules that I impose on myself to create collage series. Limits are boosters of creativity and I love working with them.” According to him, “in commercial work this is not always possible because of time and concept limits. In commercial work the brief is at the same time the limit and the inspiration. You have to make the most of the story that someone else wants you to tell.”

Take a look at some of his creations (commercial and otherwise) in the gallery below:

The post Finding Order In Chaos: Max-o-matic’s Collage Art appeared first on PlayJunkie.

Inspired by graffiti, urban decay, and music, Voelker experiments with his source material, challenging our ideas about collage art. “I developed a process to fix the charcoal to paper to ensure its reliability as a medium for collage,” he explains. “The drawings are cut and arranged, layer after layer until a finished work emerges.”

With printmaking, Voelker first makes the prints with ink or paint, after which he cuts and collages them into complex layers with intersecting lines and spaces. According to him, this work involves an improvisational process of placing the pieces on a board, then arranging them as he sees fit.

Some of his work consists of white ovals or circles framing them (which are also collaged). According to Voelker, these ovals represent portals, through which the viewer is invited to look inside and catch a glimpse of something on the other side.

“I consider collage a language,” he says “and find interest in how individual pieces come together to convey a story.” Take a closer look:

The post Daniel Voelker is Fluent In the Language of Collage Making appeared first on PlayJunkie.

Originally from England and currently based in Berkeley, California, McCann’s creative passion sparked early on, taking to painting, drawing, cutting, and reading from a very young age. “I ended up going to fashion school and working in the industry for a little while but after I moved to the USA with my family I started painting again and taking art classes,” she relayed in an interview with Jung Katz. “I became fascinated with collage and eventually gave up the paintbrush and took up the scissors.”

Now, armed with just a pair of scissors, she creates her intricate, hand cut collages, which she admits reflect her Victorian obsession with faeries, flora, and fauna. Those are collected from her large collection of books, prints, and pages that are antique, forgotten, and foxed with age. “I cut out images, categorize them and then eventually piece them together like a complex paper jigsaw,” she explains on her website.

A common theme throughout her work is the female face, which often acts as a reflection of the natural and sometimes magical world. She can be surrounded by birds, fish, and butterflies or submerged in a dense wallpaper pattern which either represents her prison or her liberation.

Here are some highlights from McCann’s rich portfolio:

The post Where Beauty is Strange and Creatures Are Curious: ​Katie McCann’s Collage Art appeared first on PlayJunkie.

Her magazine paintings aim to liberate and transform the figures she collects beyond recognition to create ethereal yet provocative works that question notions of identity and how women are perceived and perceive themselves. “My aim is to test the limits of the paper and paint,” she explained in a piece she wrote for Create Magazine. “I am looking for reactions between the paint and the paper and how one layer of paint is impacted by the preceding layers.”

According to Brewster, there is often buckling, cracking, and distortions in colors. Such unpredictability is thrilling to her. “I am always testing the materials, colors, and textures to act beyond what I expect and can control,” she writes. “I encourage the paint to do things it’s not supposed to do to create happy accidents.”

Ironically enough, her cut-up paintings and collages have been published in many glossy magazines themselves, including Vogue, World of Interiors, and Marie-Claire Maison. Her work has also been exhibited widely – from Manchester Art Gallery to Sydney, Australia.

But you can also follow her online:

The post Painting, Stippling, and Layering: Claire Brewster’s Unique Artwork appeared first on PlayJunkie.

The results are striking portraits that blend into the paper maps upon which they were illustrated. According to Fairburn, his aim with these works is to preserve the functionality of each map by feeding the composition instead of fighting it. To accomplish this, he often spends hours studying each map before beginning any physical processes.

“I like a map that’s easy to fold away, but I don’t let that influence my choice,” he added in an interview with yatzer in which he described his preferred materials. “I’ll either source my maps from charity shops or old book shops – we have lots of both here in the UK,” he explained. “If I’m working on a specific commission I’ll usually source a map on the internet to make the most suitable choice, in terms of the location. When considering a map to work on, I look at the patterns, orientation, and other characteristics – I usually find that the more ‘cluttered’ maps offer the most scope.”

Using the found paper maps as his canvas, Fairburn is interested in the subtlety of each synchronization, and the way in which each completed map behaves more like a portrait when viewed from further away. Take a closer look:

The post Ed Fairburn Transforms Paper Maps Into Portraits appeared first on PlayJunkie.

Much like her creations, her approach to collage making is rather unique. Intertwining different film and TV genres – from vintage Hollywood to 1970s sci-fi, B-movies, and TV trash – Rivans’ work is in a constant dialogue with cultures of the past, reinventing existing film plots and narratives while spinning bizarre and dreamlike tales.

Like most collage artists, her process begins with an extensive collection of vintage ephemera, which she scavenges from antique books and retro magazines. Like piecing together an unruly jigsaw puzzle, Rivans begins to collate and assemble the cut-out fragments and scraps, laboring over long periods and making alteration after alteration, until the collage begins to take shape.

Her use of collage might reflect the complex and fragmented world from which her art arises, but an attention to beauty and to the harmony of composition gestures optimistically towards the social capacity to piece it back together again.

Rivans’ work takes the form of both large-scale originals and limited edition prints. Each of her artworks is the product of months of careful deliberations and decisions, every tiny tweak necessary in the final formation. The result – whether big or small – is well worth following.

The post Surrealism Meets Pop-Art: Follow Collage Artist Maria Rivans appeared first on PlayJunkie.

“I decided on the medium of collage because I didn’t have money to buy ‘proper’ supplies like fancy brushes or even canvas when I first started out,” he admits on his website. “The paper I used then and still use today comes from abandoned spaces – old farmhouses, burned down buildings, abandoned gas stations, and the like.”

Multilayered and rich in narrative, his artwork weaves tales of foregone eras and untamed wilderness in an attempt to reignite our sense of adventure and wonder for the rugged American landscape. “I grew up on a farm, caught crickets and bailed hay, painted with mud, dug up civil war relics, listened to midnight mockingbirds,” he writes. “These are the ingredients of life that have stuck with me and have built the foundation for the artwork I set forth into the world.” 

Previously employed as an Interpretive Naturalist for the USDA Forest Service, Geiman seeks to combine his interests in art-making with his studies of biology and American history. Inspired by his longstanding fascination with the flora and fauna of his native Shenandoah Valley, country-western iconography, and folk and agrarian traditions, his expansive portfolio includes large-scale faux-taxidermy wall sculptures, elaborate paper collage portraits of classic American icons, and Animalia, as well as a plethora of mixed media works.

Handcrafting each work from an array of materials he’s been salvaging and collecting since I was a child, one single collage piece can take anywhere from a few weeks to a few months to complete. “I like to spend time reminiscing on the past while flipping through the pages of decades forgotten magazines, intently searching for the perfect shape, color, or texture within a periodical’s pages to add to my archive of collage elements,” he says.

Follow his Instagram page for more:

The post Dolan Geiman Reuses Found Materials In Unique Ways appeared first on PlayJunkie.