Teaching artist Sarah Zeffiro demonstrates how to make a creative collage using geometric and organic shapes, inspiration from magazines, and markers or crayons on paper.

Vocabulary You Will Learn:

• Collage—A type of visual art in which different materials are combined to create a new piece of art.
• Geometric shapes—Shapes, such as squares, triangles, and circles, with perfect, uniform measurements.
• Organic shapes—Irregular or asymmetrical shapes typically associated with things found in nature, such as clouds, plants, and rocks.

Materials You Will Need:

• Several pieces of paper in different colors
• Markers, crayons, or other drawing utensils
• A magazine
• Scissors
• Tape or glue

How to Create Your Own Shape Collage 

1. Start by drawing some geometric shapes on your piece of paper, such as triangles, squares, and rectangles. You can look around to get some inspiration: what shapes do you see in the room around you? Using your drawing utensil, draw a few geometric shapes of different sizes on your paper. Then, using a different color, add some organic shapes. What organic shapes do you see around you? Do you see clouds, or rocks, or flowers? You can add some of these to your drawing.
2. Next, take out your magazine and look for pictures that you might want to add to create your collage. Think about where you might want them to go and how they might fit into the rest of your picture. If you’d like to, you can also draw your own shapes on a different colored sheet of paper. You can cut out these shapes from the magazine or from your own drawings, or you can tear them if you want the edges to have a bit more texture. 

3. Now, it’s time to arrange the cut or torn shapes on your drawing to create the collage. They can overlap with the shapes you drew on the paper, or even jut out from the sides. Experiment with moving them around on the drawing, and when you decide where you’d like them to be, tape or glue them down.
4. Finally, pick up your drawing utensil again to add some finishing touches to your collage. You can add lines, shapes, dots, squiggles, or whatever else you feel like your collage needs to be complete. These can be inside of, in between, or even on top of your existing shapes!

In this video, Sarah shows us how to make a shape collage using drawings, pictures from magazines, and inspiration from our surroundings. If you want to go even further, think about these questions: 

• Where else can you get inspiration for your collage, aside from your surroundings? Are there any pictures in books you love that have shapes you’d like to include? What about shapes from other environments that you can think of, such as school or a friend’s house?
• Where else can you cut pictures from to add to your collage? What about ads you’ve received in the mail, or pictures from coloring books, or old takeout menus? 
• How can you add more texture to your collage? What if you attached tissue paper, or tin foil, or pieces of felt, or glitter?
• Can you create a collage with a theme? What about one with all animal shapes, or all shapes from nature? Or maybe one with only shades of blue, or different shapes that involve triangles (for instance, a house with a triangle roof, a bird with a triangle beak, or a cat with triangle ears)?

Accessibility

Don’t forget that you can turn on “Closed Captioning” to view the YouTube video with English captions.

More about the Teaching Artist

Sarah Zeffiro (she/her) is an artist and educator in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, who has been teaching for 20 years. After recently earning a Master of Education, Zeffiro began a year-long teaching artist residency at Carlow University, designing educational programming and interactive installations for the campus gallery. She has also worked in virtual learning for Carnegie Museum of Art as well as the Fallingwater Institute, one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s homes and part of Pennsylvania Parks and Conservancy. Explore more of her work at https://www.zartstudios.xyz/.

Kennedy Center Education provides resources and experiences that inspire, excite, and empower students and young artists, plus the tools and connections to help educators incorporate the arts into classrooms and learning spaces of all types.

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Generous support for educational programs at the Kennedy Center is provided by the U.S. Department of Education.

Gifts and grants to educational programs at the Kennedy Center are provided by The Paul M. Angell Family Foundation; Bank of America; Capital One; The Morris and Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation; Carnegie Corporation of New York; The Ednah Root Foundation; Genesis Inspiration Foundation; Harman Family Foundation; William R. Kenan, Jr. Charitable Trust; the Kimsey Endowment; The Kiplinger Foundation; Laird Norton Family Foundation; Lois and Richard England Family Foundation; Dr. Gary Mather and Ms. Christina Co Mather; The Markow Totevy Foundation; Dr. Gerald and Paula McNichols Foundation; The Morningstar Foundation; Myra and Leura Younker Endowment Fund; The Irene Pollin Audience Development and Community Engagement Initiatives;

Prince Charitable Trusts; Dr. Deborah Rose and Dr. Jan A. J. Stolwijk; Rosemary Kennedy Education Fund; The Embassy of the United Arab Emirates; The Victory Foundation; The Volgenau Foundation; Jackie Washington; GRoW @ Annenberg and Gregory Annenberg Weingarten and Family; and generous contributors to the Abe Fortas Memorial Fund and by a major gift to the fund from the late Carolyn E. Agger, widow of Abe Fortas. Additional support is provided by the National Committee for the Performing Arts..

The content of these programs may have been developed under a grant from the U.S. Department of Education but does not necessarily represent the policy of the U.S. Department of Education. You should not assume endorsement by the federal government.