Paper Collage (Part 2)

Art Corner - July 2026

Ever since taking that class on the subject, I've been having a lot of fun experimenting with paper collage as an art medium. Mostly, I've been sticking to the junk journal style of collage -- haphazard spreads that are connected by theme or color scheme. It is a great way to relax and turn the over-thinking side of your brain off while engaging the creative side of your brain in a fun activity.

Earlier today, I attended a new paper collage class. This one was a bit different. Instead of making junk journal spreads, we were told to create an actual art piece, using paper collage as our medium. I haven't tried doing that before, but it seemed like a fun challenge. I browsed through the available piles of scrap paper until finding a couple of astromony magazines. Something in my brain lit up at the pretty images of stars. I had a vague idea of doing a night sky with a planet in the foreground. It was a start.

I'm not much of an artist. At all. But apparently I do have some part of myself that wants to express itself through art, because I had barely started working on my piece before a half-formed spark of inspiration hit me. I knew what I wanted to make. Or, at least, I knew what feelings and emotions I wanted my collage to represent. I spent a very fun hour ripping up magazine pages and pasting them together, using a paint marker to highlight the rough edges between pieces. A piece of cardstock was needed for the planet's ring, but I tried to stick to magazines for everything else.

The finishing touch was the hand reaching for the distant planet. I originally was just going to find a picture of a hand and cut that out, but couldn't find any that had the right pose or size. The inspiration fairy struck again and I realized a much better way to represent what I was trying to say. I traced my own hand onto a magazine article and cut that out to paste onto the collage. It was an article about political tension, though, and I knew that that wasn't right. No one reaches for the stars through political turmoil and actually manages to touch them. So I then cut up a bunch of random articles on astronomy and planetary science. Those clippings were then pasted over the original article to fill the hand.

It was the most relaxing and fun hour I've had all month. I think paper collage as an actual art form (not just the simple journal spreads I'd been using it for) is a fascinating idea. I know it's not revolutionary, but I personally had never considered this as a possibility. And now I'm hooked.

I think the best part about paper collage is how accessible it is. Pretty much anyone can tear up scraps of paper and glue them together. There's no real barrier of entry there. And it's such a great way to express oneself without having to be talented at actually drawing or painting. It's perfect.

I'm definitely going to be exploring this further. Maybe I'll start a new art journal specifically for these type of collages.

The finished piece:

A paper collage of many images of stars glued together with rough edges. A planet sits at the center with a hand made from news articles reaching towards it from the bottom of the page.