Artist Elaine Kazimierczuk spends her summers visiting stunning meadows, taking photos to take back to her studio and turning them into works of art. An exhibition of her colourful abstract landscapes, Fresh Work, will appear at The North Wall in Spring 2021. In the video above, made in partnership with The Oxfordshire Kindness Wave, Elaine shows us how to make a meadow collage.
You will need:
- A3 size paper
- card (such as a cereal box)
- pen
- scissors
- glue
- paper scraps – anything interesting – sweet wrappers, wallpaper, magazines
- paint – for the background or use coloured paper
- Choose one meadow photo. You are going to create a meadow based on this.
- Paint a background on the A3 paper, landscape layout – this is your meadow. Paint a strip of sky at the top and the rest another colour for the meadow. You can have a blue sky and a green meadow, or you can use different colours to get a surprising effect. If you do not have paint, use coloured paper for the background. Brown paper is good.
- Next, make templates for the wildflowers. Stick the template sheet onto the card. When the glue is dry, cut out the templates. You can make your own templates too – if you do, draw them straight on the card but remember to keep the shapes simple.
- Now make the flowers. Choose some paper scraps. You often get the best results by keeping to just a few colours. Place the templates on the paper, draw round them and cut them out. Use the templates over and over to make lots of flowers and leaves. You don’t need to use every shape. For stalks or blades of grass, cut out plenty of strips.
- Next, look at your photo and arrange your cut-out flowers on the painted background so that they create a meadow effect. Start with smaller ones at the top and then work downwards, adding larger and larger ones so that they look as if they are growing in front of each other. Some pieces may stick down fully, but this adds to the effect. Go on adding flowers, stalks, leaves and grass until you have a meadow full of flowers.
