An Insight Into My Collage Process

​I always joke to my other half that I’m at my happiest when I have something to cut and stick.​

My journey into collage began with a crisis. I had been working for a good many years as a jewellery designer-maker - both retailing and wholesaling my designs . I became a victim of my own success with a repetitive strain injury in my right arm. I ignored the tingling, numbing and pain for too long.

Eventually I couldn’t ignore it any longer. It wasn’t going away. I had to make a life change.

A chance encounter in a Manchester bookshop with Julia Cameron’s book, The Artist’s Way, reignited a buried dream that I’d had since my art school days: To work as fine artist.

The art we hide - even from ourselves

The Artist’s Way led me to start a collage journal. The basis of most of the pages was small, random works on paper that I had made during my years as a maker.

If you’d asked me at the time, I would have told you that I had made NO ART over those years. The amount of collage fodder I found told a different story!

This is the work I call “the art we make when we say we’re not making any.” 

You might have some of it too. You’ll find it stuffed in a drawer, in a suitcase under your bed or in a cardboard box on the top shelf of your closet.
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From pastel to paint

In that journal I first experimented with applying colour over the collaged elements.

I used thick creamy oil pastels which blended the different elements an areas wonderfully.

I still had a real phobia about paint. I felt I had no control over it. It never seem to do what I wanted it to do. 

Mostly what I wanted it to do was behave more like an oil pastel!

It would take me another four years before I embraced acrylic paint as my medium of choice. 

Many-layered collage process

The basis for the layered process I use today was born in 2008 when ​I did a series of seven large paintings based on the story of the Handless Maiden. It goes like this:

1. Apply texture - any or all of the following:

• PVA glue squeezed from a nozzled bottle
• acrylic medium - applied with brush or spatula
• ready-mix plaster - applied with spatula or other appropriate implements
• wet-strength tissue paper

2. Matt medium to seal the texture and unify the surface
3. Gesso layer
4. Coloured acrylic ground
5. Collage pieces - paper and/or found elements
6. Matt medium to seal the collage - makes it possible to wipe paint off
7. Acrylic paint
8. Final layer of matt or gloss medium to seal

Sometimes I also do some stitching during layers 5 to 7.
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Top left: First collage sketchbooks; bottom left: collage page; right: collaged painting from the Handless Maiden series all ​© Cherry Jeffs

How I cut out my collage elements

​There’s something soothing to me about cutting paper. It takes me back to my childhood when my grandfather gave me a weighty tome that turned out to be a McCalls dress pattern catalogue. To me it looked like hundreds of pages of cut-out paper dolls! As you can imagine, it wasn’t long before I was cutting...

To this day, I still love to wield a pair of scissors. 

Listen to the audio of me talking about my cutting process: