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Sarah Janavicius demonstration "Collage", 17 April 2012 Visit her at www.eaglegalleryartists.co.uk
Sarah has had a life of art and design: graphic design; in industry, here and in Australia; teacher training; as a teacher of special needs students and, more recently, freelance painting, demonstrating and teaching. She is now studying for a fine arts degree, too. Her current passion is what she calls "Textural Collage". Inspired by the different textures she sees in her many digital photos (and Hockney), she uses all sorts of materials. Her wet-onto-dry technique for watercolours (including acrylics) makes sure that the original vibrant colours never get dulled by mixing on the paper - but having to wait for paint to dry does slow things down.	An earlier pencil drawing
	She always starts with a detailed drawing and builds up pieces to fit in specific places. For tonight's painting she had pre-prepared the drawing and all the pieces that were to be glued onto it. The demo itself consisted of examples of the techniques she had used. She started by sponging vivid green acrylics onto a mat of coarse glass fibre (use gloves with glass fibre). When this was dry it peeled off the paper remarkably easily. Sarah partly tore the glass fibre to make gaps and stuck it onto a piece of (complementary) red paper. To add interest she dribbled some PVA glue over the surface and sprinkled glitter over it.
Then, on clean sheets of paper, Sarah painted: FW acrylic ink onto paper through sheets of large and small-mesh scrim. When dry, the scrim was removed, leaving similar patterns of different-scale squares - for distance). Watercolour (softer for far-distance), gouache (mid-distance) and acrylic (brighter for foreground) in turn onto cling-film, three different sizes of bubble-wrap, a piece of doormat, a piece of carpet and some corrugated cardboard. These were transferred immediately, a sort of monoprint, to the pieces of paper.
	A farm gate had been produced by painting a sheet of paper, as large as the final gate, in browns and black, using the cling-film texture technique. An outline drawing of the gate had then been transferred to the painted sheet and the holes between the timbers cut out with a scalpel and discarded. The resulting shape was then available to stick onto the collage. There is also a tree. Thick texture paste was trowelled on and painted over (always wet-onto-dry) with burnt sienna and copper FW ink and finally, using a decorator's small roller, with raw and burnt umber. This gave an incredibly realistic bark effect.
	A roller was also used to make a totally flat blue (cyan, ultra and white) to be stuck on as sky. Finally, she planned to add a foreground silhouette of black-painted pressed flowers. The end of the demo, below left, was not the end of the painting. The second tree had hardly been started and none of the collage pieces had actually been stuck down. Sarah was kind enough to send us a photo of the finished work, below right (your guess is as good as mine as to the truth of the colours).
Everyone seemed to have enjoyed the evening and there was talk of asking Sarah back to do a workshop with us. Let's hope that proves possible. Thanks Sarah - very illuminating! - End of demo (my photo) - Framed picture (Sarah's)

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