Article Type Making Art Together Making Art Together Categories Collage

Transportation Collage!

Recently, Summer Art Studio intern Kyra LaCour designed a Special Sunday program for museum guests. She planned the event, prepared materials, and facilitated art making in the Art Studio. The following is her description of the project:

My idea for a Special Sunday project was to create a way for guests of all ages to time travel. I have always had an interest in old-fashioned things as well as travel, so I thought what better way to combine the two than a collage project. We used black and white images of modes of transportation that we found inside books of Victorian clip art from libraries around the area.

Stack of clip art books with some pages open to cars and trees.

To start developing this project, I tagged the pages in the clip art books that had a lot of transportation images. We then photo copied the pages so we wouldn’t damage the original books, and so we would have plenty of images available. After getting all the images we wanted to use, we began cutting them out to make them easier to collage with.

Close up view of the three transportation types; land, air, and sea

Of course when you travel you need somewhere to travel to. For inspiration, I picked several background images from the books and we created lots of copies of those too.

Close up view of the background options; including a city scene, inside a cave, a mountain scene, and some ocean and beach scenes

Finally when it came to getting the tables set up, we put out little bins of scissors, glue sticks, and assorted colored pencils. The scissors were for anyone who wanted to edit a collage image their own way. The glue sticks were for guests to stick their collage pieces together. The colored pencils were for guests to add a splash of color to their collage since the original images were black and white.

Back section of the Art Studio all set up with the transportation collage materials

After a week or so of preparation, the Special Sunday arrived! It turned out to be a quiet day in the Art Studio without many guests. We were pleased to see, however, that the guests who engaged in the transportation collage seemed to really enjoy themselves. During the quiet times, I decided to make a few example collages myself, and while I did those, it got more people involved and I got the chance to see some people create some very fun and different collages inspired by vintage transportation.

Two example transportation collages

Despite it being only a small crowd that participated in the Special Sunday project, it was no less inspiring. My favorite parts were looking through the clip art books and finding so many interesting examples of transportation from long ago, and then seeing guests of all ages find the same joy in discovering those whimsical transportation examples and using them to travel to different imaginary places.